["The demon that turned into worms": the translation of public health in the British Caribbean, 1914-1920]. / "O demônio que se transformou em vermes": a tradução da saúde pública no Caribe Britânico, 1914-1920.

ABSTRACT

The earliest programs of the Rockefeller Foundation's International Health Commission - IHC were pilot projects for the treatment of hookworm disease in the British colonies of British Guiana and Trinidad. These pioneering ventures into international health have often been portrayed as governed by rigid biomedical principles. In contrast to this view, the article emphasizes the degree to which the exigencies of a public health project that sought to make biomedicine intelligible within the medical systems of subject populations combined with the knowledge of local IHC staff members of Indo-Caribbean descent to generate some fascinating experiments in ethno-medical translation. One term in particular "The Demon that Turned into Worms" is focused on to show how these efforts at medical translation may have legitimized and promoted medical pluralism.