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  • Las estadísticas de salud en México: Ideas, actores e instituciones, 1810–2010 by Claudia Agostoni and Andrés Ríos Molina
  • Casey Lurtz
Claudia Agostoni and Andrés Ríos Molina. Las estadísticas de salud en México: Ideas, actores e instituciones, 1810–2010. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas/Secretarial de Salud, Direction General de Information en Salud, 2010. 384 pp. ISBN: 978-607-02-1482-0, $30.00 (paper).

Published as a part of Mexico’s bicentennial celebration in 2010, Las estadísticas de salud en México is a compendium of analytical [End Page 664] essays and primary source documents that traces the history of collecting and analyzing health statistics from the country’s independence to the present. The volume was the product of a collaborative project involving historians Claudia Agostoni and Andrés Ríos Molina from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), and the national Department of Health, represented by Gabriela Villarreal Levy. Together, these scholars and practitioners have produced a volume that examines how quantifying the health of Mexico’s inhabitants became an integral part of measuring the health of the nation itself.

Organized in six chapters that follow a standard per iodization of modern Mexican history, the book is a straightforward introduction to the history of public health in the country and will hopefully prove an impetus for future research in the field. From the immediate post-Independence paucity of both governmental organization and statistical production emerged a hierarchical, interconnected set of national bureaus responsible for collecting and producing information in an ever-more standardized form. Agostoni and Ríos Molina frame public health as yet another arena in which to examine how the consolidation of Mexico’s central government facilitated the creation of a national body and a national ideology. Each chapter includes three to five primary documents—essays, policy statements, selections from instruction manuals, and articles—produced by the individuals and institutions involved in promoting and standardizing the practice of collecting health statistics. Also included in the volume is a selection of one hundred images, charts, photographs, letters, and advertisements reproduced from the multitude of archives visited by the authors. Frustratingly, many of these images, especially the tables, graphs, and maps, are too small to read.

The volume begins just prior to Independence, and traces the development of the idea of “medical geography,” or the study environmental conditions and their relationship to life expectancy and the pervasiveness of particular diseases, across the nineteenth century. It shows how figures such as Antonio Garcia Cubes, Gustavo Ruiz y Sandoval, Vicente Reyes, and others incorporated European innovations in the analysis of demographic information into their quest for a well-orchestrated national statistical agency. Although the turmoil of civil war kept this goal at arms length during this period, the epidemics of typhoid, yellow fever, and smallpox that ravaged the country made it an ever more urgent project.

In the following chapters, the authors argue that the relative peace of the Perforator provided a context in which both prescriptive and interpretive institutions could begin to thrive. The drive for a uniform national demographic statistical apparatus was united [End Page 665] to policy initiatives to fight disease and improve life expectancy, particularly in Mexico City. National prestige was tied to both public health and a well-developed understanding of that health. Unfortunately, the authors do little beyond brief mentions of European scholars to place this shift within the global context of positivism and eugenics.

With the brief interruption of the Mexican Revolution, Agostoni and Ríos Molina follow the thread of institutionalized knowledge across the twentieth century. They argue that education and health were integral to the regeneration of the nation in the wake of the Revolution, especially with regards to the rural population. National and international institutes worked to professionalize both the practice and the study of medicine and sanitation, involving an ever-broader segment of the population in campaigns against endemic diseases, infant mortality, and low life expectancy. The final chapter, written by Villarreal Levy, captures the transition from individually driven projects to bureaucracy with its schematics and...

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