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

2021, Estudios Mexicanos/Mexican Studies

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