
- hernandj@southwestern.edu
- 512.863.1428
- Mood-Bridwell 214
Associate Professor of History
Expertise
Modern Mexico, Latin America, Medicine, Science, Pubic Health, Medical Education, Homeopathy, Global Scientific Networks, Traditional/Popular Healing, Popular Science, Spiritualism/Spiritism
Dr. Hernandez Berrones is a historian interested in understanding how disputes over scientific and medical knowledge cause social, cultural, and political change. Particularly, he is interested in how hegemonic models of medical science, medical institutions and public health policies change as a result of contending understandings of the body, health, and disease. He received his B.Sc. in Biology and M.A. in Philosophy of Science at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He graduated from the doctoral program in the History of Health Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco under the supervision of Dorothy Porter and Gabriela Soto Laveaga. He became interested in the history of medicine, science, and public health as a result of his own family experiences with medical pluralism. His book titled A Revolution in Small Doses: Homeopathy, the Medical Profession, and the State in Mexico, 1893-1942 is under contract with the University of North Carolina Press. He recently published the article “Homeopathy ‘for Mexicans’: Medical Popularisation, Commercial Endeavours, and Patients’ Choice in the Mexican Medical Marketplace, 1853-1872” in Medical History. His work received the 2016 Pressman Award of the American Association for the History of Medicine given to an outstanding PhD dissertation in twentieth-century history of medicine and a proposal to turn it into a publishable monograph. It also received the 2015 Hans-Walz Prize for studies in the history of homeopathy by the Institute of the History of Medicine of the Robert Bosch Foundation in Stuttgart, Germany.
In the News