“…These doctors claimed that studying local pathologies, such as the periodic fevers of hot climates, was the way to create a national medicine on the basis of a body of doctrine of their own, which they argued could take advantage of their privileged situation, since they were located where the fevers themselves were produced -in a hot climate (García, 2007). These arguments changed by 1887, when the practice of preventive inoculation of microorganisms against yellow fever in Mexico, Brazil and Colombia (Benchimol, 1999;García, 2012a;Lozano, 2008;Warner, 1985) triggered a debate among Colombian doctors that culminated with the acceptance of yellow fever as a specific disease caused by a germ yet to be established (García, 2012a). The rhetoric of building a national medicine was replaced in the late 1880s by one that expressed the physicians' wish to become part of a "universal science" thanks to the new medical bacteriology, in a process that involved a transformation in the ways of knowing and the objectivity seen as legitimate among Colombian scientific and medical elites (García, Pohl-Valero, 2016).…”