“An Unusual and Fast Disappearing Opportunity”: Infectious Disease, Indigenous Populations, and New Biomedical Knowledge in Amazonia, 1960–1970

In 1966, a team made up of Brazilian and foreign scientists spent a week carefully recording the body temperature and other clinical signs and symptoms of 110 Tiriyó Indigenous people in their communities along the Brazil-Suriname border. Led by the Yale University virologist and immunologist Francis Black, the researchers faced an "epidemic" with a special profile, distinct from those most common in Indigenous populations, which usually resulted in widespread illness, the collapse of subsistence activities, hunger, and as a rule, elevated mortality.Rather, what was happening with the Tiriyó was a planned event, controlled and carefully...