Book Review of Heather McCrea, Diseased Relations: Epidemic, Public Health, and State-Building in Yucatán, Mexico, 1847-1924 (original) (raw)
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Diseased Relations: Epidemics, Public Health, and State-Building in Yucatán, Mexico, 1847–1924
Ethnohistory, 2012
Deep History brings together anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians to ponder the challenges of studying the remote past that extends back long before writing. A series of co-authored essays attempt to remove the barriers that separate what the editors call deep and shallow history, studied by seemingly different and distinct methodologies. The chapters form "a master narrative" in four parts. Part I, "Problems and Orientation," comprises two chapters. An introduction stresses the importance of deep history, arguing that historians have not yet adjusted to the reality of such a past. Chapter 2, "Imagining the Human in Deep Time," develops four fundamental metaphors and orientations that can be used as links to the remoter past-kinshipping, exchange, extensions, hospitality, and genealogy. This thought-provoking chapter sets the stage for the three parts that follow. Part II examines three topics. Chapter 3, "The Body," connects us to the past through the human form, shaped for most of our existence by culture, more recently by the epigenetic forces of the modern world. Chapter 4, "Energy and Ecosystems," argues that feedback loops and conjoined patterns of cause and effect, which can be traced far back into the past, are effective devices for deep history. Language receives emphasis, because of both the genealogical relationships between languages and the notion of a web or net; exchanges between languages were crucial to the development of human speech. Four chapters explore "Shared Substance," among them food and deep kinship, on the argument that sharing is a highly adaptable process that can reveal striking transformations in human behavior. Unlike our primate cousins, we have used food and kinship to create worlds that are highly aware of past and present. Networks of relationship and exchange are also shared substances that represent kinshipping, which allows us to communicate over distance and also to reconnect, a basic tool for creating history. The ªnal set of essays, "Human Expansion," takes a broad perspective. Migration discusses the movements of humans around the world, which is made possible by cultural toolkits and mobility. Changes in social networks, different food ways, and adaptations resulted from the settlement of different continents. "Goods" refers to material objects that connected distant populations and built complex exchange networks, the effects of which changed deep history. "Scale" ably dissects the assumption that human development is progressive, cumulative, and directional. Herein lies the central argument of this book: Deep time is visible in the structure of our minds and bodies and in our created material and social world-"the storehouse of the human experience" (272). Deep History attempts to decipher the challenges of melding the remote and more recent past into a uniªed history of humankind. The chapters are perceptive, if at times esoteric in their arguments.
História, Ciências, Saúde-Manguinhos, 2018
While commercial links between Mexico and the United States through the port city of Veracruz brought significant economic and social advantages in the early nineteenth century, public health concerns around yellow fever produced fascination and fear among US audiences (in southern and eastern port cities) from times of peace until the US invasion and occupation of Mexico (1846-1848). This article addresses the complex linkages between commerce, conflict, and contamination in reference to the port city of Veracruz and the United States in Mexico’s early decades of independence. More specifically, this article addresses the concern in early nineteenth-century US periodicals around yellow fever outbreaks and potential contamination, showing the constant presence of yellow fever in Veracruz in the US imaginary.
Estudios Mexicanos/Mexican Studies, 2021
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