Latino Mental Health
What brings you in to see me today?” This is the typical question asked of new patients during a psychiatric evaluation in a Boston clinic. When asked of a Latino patient, however, the answer…
Category: Health and Equity
Health: the Hope of Haiti
At no time have I felt more vital than in serving at Partners In Health (PIH), and seldom more needed than in places like Haiti. In the Haitian people, as well as in every other country that PIH serves, we find an…
Whither Equity in Health?
A waiting room in a charity clinic in rural Haiti. It is a humid afternoon, and huge drops of warm rain are starting to fall. A young woman is watching as her ten-year-old son, Dominique, clutches…
Safe Blood for Transfusion
José Oscar Cotto López has donated 140 pints of blood since 1966. The 53-year old resident of San Salvador, El Salvador, does so because he believes it is an expression of love. “We must be…
Reproductive Health
On a hot, dusty day in the middle of a long drought, I attended a day-long assembly convened by the Ministry of Health’s Reproductive Health and Family Planning Program in Chulucanas, the…
Program in Clinical Effectiveness
As a family physician, I’ve always been interested in primary care and also in the broader perspective of health care systems focusing both on the individual patients and on populations…
Physicians for Human Rights
As a member of a 1983 American Public Health Association delegation to evaluate medical neutrality in El Salvador, I saw mothers and children begging for food and for help in getting…
Medicinal Herbs in Times of Low Intensity War
Julio was wet from the pouring rain and frightened. He ran through the streets of Polho, a community in Chiapas sympathetic to the Zapatista rebels, to find Carlos, the health promoter…
A Latina Looks at Disparities
It was my first year of medical school in a new city far from home. I came to Harvard Medical School in the fall of 1999 with many preconceived notions of what I would encounter. Coming…
Health Technology
Advances in computer and telecommunications technology are expanding the promise of medical knowledge, interventions and prevention to the most remote and impoverished regions…
Health in the Americas
The state of health of the Western Hemisphere, I am pleased to say, is improving, distinguished readers. Every country in the Americas is experiencing a decline in child mortality, a decrease in…
Enhancing the Care of People
Known for its rich, multi-layered culture and the warmth of its people, Brazil is a favorite destination of Sofia Gruskin, assistant professor of Health and Human Rights at the Harvard…
Emerging Infections
We all know infectious diseases from personal experience. Starting in childhood we typically experience influenza, chickenpox, strep infections of the throat, viruses that cause upper…
Doctors in the Field
Zamorano, Honduras – The family of eight rural villagers crowded on a narrow wooden school bench in the improvised clinic. They had traipsed from their tiny village, almost two hours more…
Decentralization
We were in the mayor’s office in a small village outside Cochabamba, Bolivia to interview officials about the impact of the new Popular Participation Law that had granted municipalities new…
Cuba: Through A Public Health Lens
We hailed from countries in East and South Asia, Europe, Latin America, and North America, and included professionals in law, psychology, social work, nursing and medicine. For all of us on the…
Creating Nuestros Cuerpos, Nuestras Vidas
As a Cuban Jewish American woman of Polish and Russian descent, I continue to discover how profoundly politics weaves itself into our intimate psychic life, its compelling poetics entangled…
Harvard Business School: New Research Center in Latin America
THE HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL launches its first research center in Latin America with the recent opening of the Latin America Research Center (LARC) in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The region offers substantial prospects…
Reaching Out
A key component of DRCLAS outreach efforts, school visits pair students in grades six through twelve with Harvard scholars and artists involved in the Latin American and Latino Art Forum…
Infectious Diseases
Harvard Medical School’s pre-clinical curriculum has some telling blind spots. During the first two years, we mostly discussed diseases prevalent in the United States and other developed…
