For All of Humanity: Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala - Hardcover

Few, Martha

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0816531889 ISBN 13: 9780816531882

Publisher: University of Arizona Press, 2015

Synopsis

Smallpox, measles, and typhus. The scourges of lethal disease—as threatening in colonial Mesoamerica as in other parts of the world—called for widespread efforts and enlightened attitudes to battle the centuries-old killers of children and adults. Even before edicts from Spain crossed the Atlantic, colonial elites oftentimes embraced medical experimentation and reform in the name of the public good, believing it was their moral responsibility to apply medical innovations to cure and prevent disease. Their efforts included the first inoculations and vaccinations against smallpox, new strategies to protect families and communities from typhus and measles, and medical interventions into pregnancy and childbirth.

For All of Humanity examines the first public health campaigns in Guatemala, southern Mexico, and Central America in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Martha Few pays close attention to Indigenous Mesoamerican medical cultures, which not only influenced the shape and scope of those regional campaigns but also affected the broader New World medical cultures. The author reconstructs a rich and complex picture of the ways colonial doctors, surgeons, Indigenous healers, midwives, priests, government officials, and ordinary people engaged in efforts to prevent and control epidemic disease.

Few’s analysis weaves medical history and ethnohistory with social, cultural, and intellectual history. She uses prescriptive texts, medical correspondence, and legal documents to provide rich ethnographic descriptions of Mesoamerican medical cultures, their practitioners, and regional pharmacopeia that came into contact with colonial medicine, at times violently, during public health campaigns.

About this title

About the Author:

Martha Few is an associate professor of Latin American history at the University of Arizona. She is the author of Women Who Live Evil Lives: Gender, Religion, and the Politics of Power in Colonial Guatemala and co-editor of Centering Animals in Latin American History.

Review:

“Martha Few has opened a fresh window into the new knowledge of the Enlightenment as it filtered into the Americas and was impacted and nurtured by the findings of creole intellectuals and native healers as they faced the challenges of epidemic disease and public health.”—Noble David Cook, author of Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492-1650

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Arizona Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0816531889
• ISBN 13: 9780816531882
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304