Tropical diseases

ABSTRACT

That environmental determinism brushed in such large strokes proved imaginary and excessively fatalistic does not mean that the american tropics did not present substantial challenges to culture. Nature decided neither race nor intelligence, nor did it determine the region's ultimate cultural sucess or failure, but it did profoundly shape the contours of Latin American civilization, just as it did others. The same climate that permitted the harvesting of multiple crops each year and that indeed made it possible to grow such export crops as sugar, coffee, and bananas, also presented culture with diseases, insects, weather extremes, and natural disasters that plagued human bodies, attacked plant tissues, destroyed urban infrastructure, and even influenced geopolitics. It bears repeating that little of this led to inevitabilities. Both nature and culture are too irrepressibly clever to be entirely determined by the other, and altogether too doggedly tenacious to fail to transform one another appreciably. What remains difficult to quantify is whether tropical nature. Recent work on disasters, diseases, and agriculture in temperate climes seems to suggest that the term temperate may be a misnomer. But there is little question that tropical America offered entirely different challenges than those faced by Turner's North American frontiersmen, and the European settlers' lack of tropical experience must of placed them at some disadvantage.