Curar, sanar y educar: Enfermedad y Sociedad en México, Siglos XIX Y XX (review)

This book gathers a series of articles that evaluate local and international initiatives (disease eradication campaigns, health education policies, and the modernization of health institutions) devoted to transforming Mexico’s public health conditions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book’s contributors succeed in demonstrating how intertwined public health, political motivations, economic interests, international pressures, and morality have been throughout this history. They also show how public health initiatives in Mexico, although directed mostly toward marginalized populations (peasants, prostitutes, and physically disabled people), ignored social and economic realities, focusing instead on individual behavior, access to Western medicine, and hygienic education.

The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 examines the central role that health education campaigns—financed and organized by local hospitals, schools, and varied medical institutions—acquired in the nineteenth century. These campaigns aimed to modify hygienic practices and spread the use of Western medicine among infants, physically disabled people, and peasants. For medical elites, these much-publicized education campaigns also had the goal of revalidating the role of Western medicine in the modernization of Mexico. Part 2 analyzes the intertwined relation between medical ideas and moral judgments in the construction of abortion, prostitution, and nourishment as public health problems during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Part 3 focuses on the international and local political motivations and economic interests of the disease eradication campaigns of the first half of the twentieth century. Collectively, articles in Part 3 show very clearly how hookworm, malaria, or yellow fever eradication campaigns were resisted, adapted, and transformed according to local realities by local actors. This happened despite the illusions of international health officers and agencies of the possibility of conducting successful public health campaigns with no regard for local health habits, medical ideas, or traditional means of confronting diseases.

This book is certainly an important contribution to Mexican and Latin American medical historiography. It introduces original topics, such as Anne Staples’s study on the role of primary schools in the promotion of hygienic habits among infants and Christian Julliard’s article on medical stigmas attached to blindness. The history of physical disabilities and the role of nonmedical institutions in public health are still voids to be filled by Latin American historiography. This book also highlights the limits of vertical approaches to health, the multiple actors involved in the institutionalization of health care in Mexico, and the multiple interests, beside humanitarian motivations, behind public health initiatives.

This book is sure to be enjoyed by a wide audience of researchers studying Latin America, such as historians of medicine, social historians, and university students.