Medicine on the Periphery: Public Health in Yucatan, Mexico, 1870-1960

Medicine on the Periphery examines the history of the public health of Yucatan, Mexico, from the 1870s through 1960. This book includes chapters on institutions, healers, changing patterns of disease, the biomedicalization of Yucatan, and the relationship between Yucatan and the Mexican Revolutionary government. Sowell analyzes Yucatec officials’ establishment of public health programs as a strategy for the modernization of the region, using wealth from the production of henequen to create Mexico’s most extensive public health system and
subsequent tensions with the Revolutionary government. Public health programs situated the Yucatan into a complex position in the nexus of knowledge, power, and technologies of the Atlantic medical community. Medicine on the Periphery provides a comprehensive look at how Yucatan became a medical periphery, a status that made it increasingly dependent upon knowledge and technologies produced in the productive core of the North Atlantic and subject to the authority of the Mexican state. This book will be of interest to scholars in Mexican studies, history of medicine and public health in Latin America and in the Atlantic world.