Compromised Positions: Prostitution, Public Health, and Gender Politics in Revolutionary Mexico City (review)
to be active up to the present, at least in part because the state had inadequate resources to provide modern medical care for all. Moreover, many people preferred an integral approach to healing that also drew upon their faith. In contemporary Latin America, the continuing vitality of both medical ideologies has resulted in a system that might be described as medical pluralism. Many people consult healers, but also go to modern hospitals. Healing cults have developed around saintly figures who had also been physicians, such as Venezuela's Jose Gregorio Hernandez and Costa Rica's Ricardo Moreno Canas. Sowell's necessarily brief overview of the contemporary scene does not permit him to tackle the intriguing question of why Hernandez and Moreno inspired cults while Perdomo did not. Perhaps Hernandez and Moreno, as men of science and of faith, figuratively represented both ideologies while Perdomo's history located him solely on the side of the empirics.