Marcos Cueto is a professor at Casa de Oswaldo Cruz, Fiocruz, in Rio de Janeiro; co-editor of the journal História, Ciências, Saúde-Manguinho; and a researcher at Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, Lima, where he served as director-general from 2009 to 2011. Steven Palmer is Associate Professor of History and Canada Research Chair in History of International Health at the University of Windsor, Ontario.

• 1. Indigenous medicine, official health, and medical pluralism; 2. National medicines and sanitarian states; 3. Making national and international health; 4. Medical innovation in the twentieth century; 5. Primary health care, neoliberal response, and global health in Latin America; 6. Conclusion.

'This remarkable book is the first study to weave together a detailed and sophisticated understanding of the historical transformations of medical education, public health, and medicine in Latin America from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries. With a strong narrative, remarkable insights and a thorough examination of some of the most recent findings, research questions, and methodologies, Cueto and Palmer provide a lucid and novel historical reassessment of indigenous medicines, medical pluralism, national and international health agendas, disease eradication, rural health, medical innovations, and global health. Their proposal of two novel concepts, 'culture of survival' and 'health in adversity', will most definitively enable rich and useful reexaminations of the histories and realities of the flexible, dynamic, contradictory, fragmented and discontinuous public health initiatives, policies and discourses of the region. Inspiring and informative, this book will find an audience in both professional historians and the general public alike.' Claudia Agostoni, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México