Review, Paul Ramirez, Enlightened Immunity: Mexico's Experiments with Disease Prevention in the Age of Reason (original) (raw)

Abstract

In Enlightened Immunity, Paul Ramírez takes us to colonial Mexico during the final decades of Spanish rule to document the introduction and reception of preventative measures in public health-from quarantines and cordons sanitaires to the rise of the novel technologies of inoculation and vaccination. The book builds on the literature on the Bourbon reforms to encompass the state's heightened concern with the rational management of healthy populations as part of its broader experiment with enlightened statecraft. Seeking to understand how public-health campaigns operated "on the ground" in the absence of vast medical bureaucracies and infrastructure, Ramírez draws our attention to the multitude of actors, corporate bodies, and local communities that varyingly facilitated, mediated, questioned, and resisted new preventative measures. This is a history of Enlightenment medicine marked by "confusion, contradiction, and contestation," a "story of false starts and minor victories as the 'conquest' of a particular disease" (16). Beautifully written and carefully argued, Enlightened Immunity makes two major contributions. First, Ramírez sheds light on the experiences of ordinary laypeople in both urban and rural parts of Mexico, many of whom, he argues, "were not mere spectators of the encroachment of state policy on intimate and communal spheres of life but active participants in it" (18). Early in the book, the author introduces two widows in San Juan Guichicobi, who nursed sick infants at a local infirmary and exposed their breasts to the friar overseeing the operation when their milk supply ran out. Enlightened Immunity brims with similar characters whose "distant encounters" with "statesanctioned policies and practices" expand our understanding of public health and its actors (18). A second major insight concerns the centrality 476

Loading...

Loading Preview

Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.

References (12)

  1. Cagle, Hugh. 2018. Assembling the Tropics: Science and Medicine in Portugal's Empire, 1450-1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  2. Gómez, Pablo. 2017. The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
  3. Alamillo, José M. 2020. Deportes: The Making of a Sporting Mexican Diaspora. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
  4. Gorn, Elliott J. 1986. The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
  5. Moore, Louis. 2017. I Fight for a Living: Boxing and the Battle for Black Manhood, 1880-1915. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
  6. Emily Hind. Dude Lit: Mexican Men Writing and Performing Competence, 1955-2012. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2019. 305 pp.
  7. Bowskill, Sarah. 2011. Gender, Nation and the Formation of the Twentieth- Century Mexican Literary Canon. London: Legenda.
  8. Franco, Jean. 1989. Plotting Women. New York: Columbia University Press.
  9. Pedroza, Liliana. 2020. A golpe de linterna: m ás de 100 an ˜os de cuento mexicano. 3 vols. México: Altrasalante.
  10. Carmen Patricia Tovar, Amanda L. Petersen y Alejandro Puga, eds. María Luisa Puga y el espacio de la reconstrucción. México: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 2018. 224 pp.
  11. María Luisa Puga y el espacio de la reconstrucci ón reúne nueve estudios críticos sobre la obra de María Luisa Puga (1944-2004; Referencias
  12. Puga, María Luisa. 1978. Las posibilidades del odio. México: Siglo XXI.