Andrew J. Hogan, Life Histories of Genetic Disease: Patterns and Prevention in Postwar Medical Genetics (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), pp. 280, $40.00, hardback, ISBN: 9781421420745.

political process that fostered a growth of coercive power by means of public health is developed in Chapter 3, with a good overview of the historical development of the political and administrative sanitation procedures in the First Republic. Chapter 4 analyses the expansion of the sanitation policies and the interplay between the states and the federal government, opening up to the exceptionalism of the São Paulo state, which is detailed in Chapter 5. The final chapter concludes with consideration of the negotiation and the convergence of interests between the elites and the federal authority. In Hochman’s analysis, the understanding of communicable diseases as a national matter is a not just a process of institutions, laws and policies supported by a formal political argument. His narrative is enacted and shaped by the decisive role of historical characters like Belisário Penna, the most prominent exponent of the rural sanitation movement. Penna’s leadership and capacity to organise a consensus was important for shaping ideas into policies and also in the constitution of the Pro-Sanitation League. The League was a founded by a group composed of political, educational and medical elites, including members of the National Academy of Medicine, professors of Brazilian medical schools, Oswaldo Cruz Institute scientists, military officers, lawyers, educators and journalists. This movement became the ‘organized expression of the rural sanitation movement’ (p. 43) and championed the idea of cleaning the sertões (a sociopolitical and medical term to define abandoned areas) plagued by endemic diseases – hookworm (ancylostomiasis), malaria and Chagas disease (American trypanosomiasis). The concerns about the communicability of the diseases that plagued the sertões was a strong argument in favour of the necessity of the intervention and escalation of the state’s coercive power. The author’s confessed professional identity tied to the social sciences stresses a theoretical craftsmanship that is even more intertwined with his historical expertise. Hochman’s conceptual synergy and historical analysis has stood the test of time, but not without the challenges as discussed in the last chapter of the book, such as the discussion about the ‘natural’ duties inherent to the state (p. 150). This translation gives a wider community of scholars the opportunity to have a fruitful dialogue with the ideas orchestrated in The Sanitation of Brazil. The renewed interest in spatial categories in history and approaches that highlight tensions between the national, local and supranational scales, will stimulate fresh readings and questions. This new edition showcases the refinement of Hochman’s scholarship and also the necessity of bringing cogent ideas to history from outside the discipline, particularly at a time when Brazil’s universal health care system is facing great political challenges.