The countries of Latin America are enormously diverse demographically, geographically, politically, economically, and culturally, yet they share certain features, providing coherence to thinking about the history of health and medicine in regional terms. This article throws light on more recent scholarship that shows considerable regional innovation and the worldwide reverberation of a range of ‘homegrown’ medical ideas and practices, public health policies, and health care organizational models. It addresses these developments, diversities, and congruities through five historical eras and thematic perspectives. Finally, it concludes with an analysis of historiographical approaches in the contemporary context, exploring the major challenges facing historians writing about Latin American health and medicine today, particularly the links between history and contemporary national and global health policy issues.