One concern for Salvadoran and other Latin American public health researchers across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was the purported link between goiter (bocio) and cretinism (cretinismo). Goiter is empirical medical condition that is inseparable from scenes of social and political inequality, neocolonialism, development, and war, however effectively the tools that measured it often obfuscated these factors. This article draws on more than a century of goiter research and representation in popular culture to argue that goiter research was part of broader health discourse that focused on poor and rural women and girls in an attempt to improve the productive and reproductive potential of El Salvador. It discusses how goiter research positioned El Salvador as a site of knowledge production for global health. It also proposes that goiter is best understood as a disability and uses insights from critical disability studies to understand how certain groups of people were constructed as problem populations. Over time, understandings of goiter shifted and new explanations came to the fore, but the lingering association of goiter with inheritable disability proved difficult to shake.

中文翻译：

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地方性甲状腺肿和萨尔瓦多对抗克汀病的斗争

十九世纪和二十世纪萨尔瓦多和其他拉丁美洲公共卫生研究人员关注的一个问题是甲状腺肿（bocio）和克汀病（cretinismo）之间据称存在的联系。甲状腺肿是一种经验性的医学病症，与社会和政治不平等、新殖民主义、发展和战争的场景密不可分，无论测量它的工具多么有效，常常混淆了这些因素。本文借鉴了一个多世纪的甲状腺肿研究和流行文化中的代表性，认为甲状腺肿研究是更广泛的健康讨论的一部分，该讨论的重点是贫困和农村妇女和女孩，试图提高萨尔瓦多的生产和生殖潜力。它讨论了甲状腺肿研究如何将萨尔瓦多定位为全球健康知识生产基地。它还建议最好将甲状腺肿理解为一种残疾，并利用关键残疾研究的见解来了解某些人群如何被视为问题人群。随着时间的推移，人们对甲状腺肿的理解发生了变化，新的解释也出现了，但事实证明，甲状腺肿与遗传性残疾之间挥之不去的联系很难动摇。