Conquering Sickness: Race, Health, and Colonization in the Texas Borderlands by Mark Allan Goldberg (review)

Mark Allan Goldberg's Conquering Sickness is a study of how colonial and national states invested considerable energy to shape their Texas borderlands subjects and citizens into "healthy" people. Yet their definitions of salubrity often revealed more about the racialized and gendered imaginaries of these states than about the practical needs of local populations. As Goldberg convincingly argues by parsing missionary handbooks, state decrees, medical literature, and military reports, it was through their Eurocentric programs of healthy living that Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo-American officials attempted to transform and conquer the Texas lands and people they encountered from 1780 to 1861.

Conquering Sickness proceeds in chronological fashion from the latter part of the Spanish colonial era, through the Mexican republic period, and into the first decades of Anglo American state building while simultaneously offering comparative analysis of each regime's approach to healthy living. The first three chapters track Spanish and Mexican medical discourses and programs, with chapter one focusing on how Spanish officials responded to the major smallpox epidemics of the 1780s and 1790s and chapter two detailing missionaries' attempts to impose a Catholic way of life upon Karankawa neophytes at the Gulf missions. Here Goldberg emphasizes how the Spanish quest to dictate healthy living dovetailed with Spanish colonialism at large. Spaniards differentiated between civilized and savage healthy behaviors and medical practices; local people were expected to be healthy Catholic subjects and reject savagery by staying clean, eating right, working hard, and being sexually modest. Mexican independence and the spread of liberal ideology momentarily steered government discourse away from health, but a cholera epidemic in 1833 (the subject of chapter three) reignited conversations about healthy living. With Mexican physicians seeking to heal diseased citizens, many turned to Native health practices; fearful of their "backwards" and "superstitious" associations, officials crafted ways to legitimate—through theory and science—the Native therapies like peyote healing that they adopted.

The final two chapters explore how Anglo Americans, like their Spanish-speaking predecessors, conflated health and morality. To them, Jeffersonian agrarianism was the only means to a healthy life, especially in a place like the Texas borderlands they hardly knew, and they often attributed the sicknesses of Native and Mexican people to their supposedly indolent, nomadic, dirty, and poorly gendered lifestyles. Medical discourse thus gave Anglo Americans a formula for conquest: contain locals in small, sedentary communities to make way for the broader sweep of a slave-driven agrarianism. Successful conquest, nonetheless, still hinged upon the balancing of Anglo American exploitation with the physical health of enslaved wealth producers and white colonizing men. Ultimately, enslaved African Americans, particularly women, proved essential to maintaining their own health, and South Texas Mexicans provided the healing knowledge (like a maguey scurvy remedy) to keep U.S. soldiers well.

Conquering Sickness is, in many ways, a classic borderlands study, as Goldberg highlights how indigenous people circumvented, undermined, coopted, and rerouted the impulses and programs of imperial and national powers. Goldberg's analysis, however, is sharpest—and most significant—when he explores the connections between identity formation, everyday life, and discourses of healthy living. Like Goldberg, plenty of borderlands scholars have emphasized the roles of violence, gender ideologies, and dueling states in the construction of identity, but Goldberg's approach—with its focus on daily behaviors and bodily functions—encourages scholars to consider the more subversive elements of colonialism. It also has the potential to illuminate the agency of indigenous and marginalized people in borderlands culture change. If, as Goldberg argues, subaltern people often resisted or ignored Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo-American prescriptions of healthy living, how successful was Euro-American colonialism? And if Euro-Americans sometimes appropriated Native medicine, to what extent did indigenous people shape the daily behaviors of their supposedly civilized neighbors? Conquering Sickness offers an excellent blueprint for locating subaltern cultural markers among the conquerors and colonizers of the borderlands.