Lexington Books
Pages: 230
•
Trim: 6¼ x 9½
978-1-4985-1734-8 • Hardback • October 2015 • $121.00 • (£93.00)
978-1-4985-1735-5 • eBook • October 2015 • $45.00 • (£35.00)
David Sowell is professor of history at Juniata College and teaches courses on Latin America, international studies, and the history of medicine.
Chapter 1: Public Health and the Making of Modern Yucatán
Chapter 2: Institutionalizing Biomedicine
Chapter 3: Medical Communities
Chapter 4: Disease and Public Health Campaigns
Chapter 5: Public Health and the Revolutionary State
Chapter 6: The Biomedicalization of Yucatán
The author has an impressive command of sources in diverse archives and libraries located in Mexico and the United States. . . . Sowell’s book is a sound contribution to the history of medicine in Latin America. It is a remarkable example of how skillful historical research can produce a subnational case study that is comprehensive, coherent, profound, and relevant. Medicine on the Periphery: Public Health in Yucatan, Mexico, 1870–1960 will be of great interest to medical anthropologists, historians of Latin American medicine, and historians interested in medicine in the Atlantic.
— Bulletin of the History of Medicine
Weaving together political, institutional, social, cultural, and individual accounts, Medicine on the Periphery offers new understandings of public health transformation in Yucatán during the heyday of henequen production and through Mexico’s revolutionary era. Sowell skillfully demonstrates how the confluence of medicalization and modernity in the rivalrous state-building projects of Mexico’s federal and Yucatán’s regional governments—amidst shifting local economic, racial, and healer relations and the engagement of urban Yucatec elites with multiple international interlocutors—engendered both complementarity and contestation in the shaping of contemporary medicine.
— Anne-Emanuelle Birn, University of Toronto, author of Marriage of Convenience: Rockefeller International Health and Revolutionary Mexico
Sowell provides an excellent, engaging, accessible study of the history of medicine and healing in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula. His work emphasizes the considerable accomplishments of the region's medical elite, their connections to other communities within and beyond Mexico, and the tangled process by which the public health programs they created were subordinated to those of Mexico's federal government. Overall, a valuable contribution to the growing scholarship on the history of medicine and public health in Latin America.
— Adam Warren, University of Washington