Not available to order
Publication date:
30 October 2015Length of book:
244 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksISBN-13: 9781498517355
Medicine on the Periphery examines the history of the public health of Yucatán, Mexico, from the 1870s through 1960. This book includes chapters on institutions, healers, changing patterns of disease, the biomedicalization of Yucatán, and the relationship between Yucatán and the Mexican Revolutionary government. Sowell analyzes Yucatec officials’ establishment of public health programs as a strategy for the modernization of the region, using wealth from the production of henequen to create Mexico’s most extensive public health system and subsequent tensions with the Revolutionary government. Public health programs situated the Yucatán into a complex position in the nexus of knowledge, power, and technologies of the Atlantic medical community. Medicine on the Periphery provides a comprehensive look at how Yucatán became a medical periphery, a status that made it increasingly dependent upon knowledge and technologies produced in the productive core of the North Atlantic and subject to the authority of the Mexican state. This book will be of interest to scholars in Mexican studies, history of medicine and public health in Latin America and in the Atlantic world.
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.