François Delaporte's Chagas Disease chronicles Brazilian medicine's
encounter with a disease, an insect, and a history of discovery. Between
1909 and 1911, Carlos Chagas described an infection (pathogenic
trypanosome), its intermediate host, and the illness that he believed it
caused, parasitic thyroiditis. Chagas's work did not lack significance:
the disease that came to share his name would be one of Latin America's
most serious endemic diseases. However, the clinical identification of
the disease through "Romaña's sign" (a palpebral edema or swelling of
the eyelid) some decades later marked a transformation in the general
medical knowledge of the disease and its basis altogether. Not only was
the disease entity that Chagas had described shown to be a nosological
illusion, but twenty-five years of scientific controversy turned out to
have been based on a misunderstanding. The continued use of the term
"Chagas's Disease" even after Cecilio Romaña's discovery thus refers to
a fundamental ambiguity. Delaporte dispels this ambiguity by
re-examining the various discoveries, dead ends, controversies, and
major epistemological transformations that marked the history of the
disease--a history that begins with the creation of the Oswaldo Cruz
Institute in Rio de Janeiro and ends in the forests of Santa Fe in
northern Argentina. Delaporte's study shows how an epistemological focus
can add depth to the history of medicine and complexity to accounts of
scientific discovery.