Response to commentary by Howard Waitzkin

Abstract

We appreciate this opportunity to respond to Dr. Waitzkin's commentary. But first, we want to provide some background on the origins of our article. We first met in Santiago in 2016, when Carter, a historical geographer with many publications on the history of public health, was in the early stages of a book project on the origins of Latin American social medicine. Meanwhile, Sánchez Delgado, a historian of science, has just completed his dissertation on early twentieth-century eugenics in Chile and Argentina, and was in the midst of a three-year project, funded by Chile's Fondecyt, to analyze the actors and networks involved in the development of anatomical pathology as a discipline in Chile from the late nineteenth century to 1950. When Carter began developing his research project, Waitkzin's publications on Latin American social medicine, in English and Spanish, were an important touchstone. Naturally, retracing some of Waitzkin's own sources, and engaging his arguments and interpretations, were a key part of the research process. At our first meeting, we (Carter and Sánchez Delgado) realized that we had both arrived, independently, at a skeptical view of Waitzkin's narrative of the origins of social medicine in Chile in the early 1900s, which depended on personal connections and a shared philosophy between Virchow, Westenhöfer, and Allende. And, as time went on, we became increasingly troubled that this origin story had become widely diffused, exaggerated and simplified in the retelling, seriously distorting a complex and rich history of Chilean science and politics. We came to feel that rectifying this relatively minor point of fact could have important consequences, not just for our understanding of this history, but for historiographical practice, especially for research oriented towards the analysis of scientific expert networks between Europe and Latin America in the early twentieth century. Unfortunately, rather than engaging our arguments, Dr. Waitzkin uses most of his commentary to launch unjustifiable attacks on the character of one of us (Carter). What is most troubling is that Dr. Waitzkin calls Carter's professional and intellectual integrity into question. We emphasize that Dr. Waitzkin read a draft version of our paper and commented on it before it was accepted for publication. We were under no obligation to offer him this opportunity, as scholarly researchers are not required by any code of ethics