For All of Humanity: Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala by Martha Few (review)

In 1785, the Audiencia of Guatemala issued an edict requiring priests, barbers, healers, and doctors to perform post-mortem caesarean operations on deceased pregnant women and even on those merely suspected of pregnancy in order that the souls of fetuses might be saved through baptism. Fifteen years later, one priest in the presidio of the Petén region praised indigenous woman Nicolasa Chatá for her heroic embrace of the initiative; to save her baby's soul, she had requested the operation be performed on her even before her anticipated death by smallpox (117). Following the counsel of a local priest, an experienced indigenous barber performed the operation immediately following Chatá's death and the infant was successfully baptized before it perished. For the priest, the incident revealed "the redemptive possibilities of both Indians as converts and Indians as medical practitioners in the service of the colonial state" (117). Historian Martha Few studies the story from a variety of additional angles. In her highly original treatment of this and several other contemporary episodes, Few advances a series of nuanced readings of the history of Guatemala's late colonial public health campaigns.

For All of Humanity appraises the localized responses to several measures the late colonial state promoted involving anti-epidemic, fetal, and infant health. Few demonstrates that the impetus for these campaigns originated in Guatemala's local elite rather than, as has often been assumed, the Spanish monarchy. She also identifies the particular dimensions of the Enlightenment's expression in the Guatemalan context. With respect to caesarean operations, Few's investigation reveals how "colonial elites linked the justification and spread of the procedure to eighteenth-century notions of humanitarianism, Enlightened modernity, and religion" (100). She also pays particular attention to the language of religious, medical, and political texts used to describe wombs, sometimes depicted as "biological jails" (114), fetuses, and the process of the latter's extraction from the former. Such writings, she concludes, suggest that earlier perceptions that had granted relative autonomy to pregnant women were transformed in this era, as pregnant women were reimagined as, essentially, carriers of fetuses.

Using a broad variety of sources, including medical manuals and guides, naturalist reports, institutional medical records, travel accounts, letters, state decrees, criminal trials, and early newspapers, Few's study also seeks to uncover "the circulations of medical knowledges, technologies, and practices as they were created, discussed, and adapted within complex New World cultures in play in the Spanish Atlantic during the long eighteenth century" (12). The result is a thoroughly researched study in which the author successfully blends the sometimes esoteric details of the medical episodes she narrates within the ethno-historical context of Mayan responses to the changing face of colonization.

For All of Humanity assumes a place alongside such works as Adam Warner's Medicine and Politics in Colonial Peru, Steven Palmer's From Popular Medicine to Medical Populism, and Daniela Bleichmar's edited collection Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500–1800 in a growing body of literature that recasts the traditionally Eurocentric story of the spread of the Enlightenment and of the history of science and medicine more broadly by examining circumstances on the colonial periphery. From this vantage point, Few presents a number of insightful characterizations of the nature of public health campaigns in Enlightenment-era Guatemala. There, creoles did not promote medical practices "in opposition to peninsular or imperial medicine" but instead strove to develop medical practices that would allow them to take their place "among other enlightened nations of the world" (11). Few asserts that such medical practices "absorbed and responded to indigenous, religious, gendered, and local medical cultures" (16). Late colonial creole society had great respect, for example, for the prowess of Mayan bleeders. One colonial chronicler, Francisco Ximénez, admired Mayan curanderos so highly that he commented "Whenever I am in [Maya] pueblos and need bloodletting, I always...