Diseased Relations: Epidemics, Public Health and State-building in Yucatan, Mexico, 1847-1924

This book examines the construction of modern Mexico through the lens of public health and disease. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Mexicans endured crushing epidemics, especially in tropical Yucatan, while the political and social order around them changed drastically. As federal and state governments took on more and more responsibility for public health policies, government was extending its reach into the private sphere. The Yucatan state in this period was intent on regulating the system of raising and selling foodstuffs, creating a system of mass vaccinations, eradicating pests, and controlling drinking water, all in the name of the welfare of the people. In a peripheral state like Yucatan, with its mostly rural, indigenous Maya population and its small creole elite, public health issues were thus folded into a larger ideology, pitting "civilization" against "barbarism" in order to make "clean" citizens out of what some perceived as the filthy, the disorderly, and the rebellious. Medical plans and legislation, however, often ran counter to long-practiced rituals of burial, mourning, food preparation, and care of the sick.

Mapping pivotal shifts in public health policy and the implementation of disease prevention campaigns, McCrea's account of state-building, citizenship, and insurrection shows us a regional Mexican identity born out of the intersection of disease, revolution, and modern medicine. Placing Yucatan at the center of an international labor force, global economics (due to the henequen boom), and the modernizing medical establishment, McCrea incorporates the region into a broader discussion about socioeconomic change and the pervasive role that health care, or lack thereof, plays in human society.

"Explores an aspect of Mexican history untouched by other authors. There's nothing else out there on the long-neglected matter of health and disease."---Terry Rugeley, author of Rebellion Now and Forever: Mayas, Hispanics, and Caste War Violence in Yucatan, 1800-1880

Heather McCrea is assistant professor of history at Kansas State University.