Martha Few, For All of Humanity

For All of Humanity addresses responses to epidemic disease in colonial Central America. Focusing on the typhus and smallpox epidemics that ravaged the administrative region known as the Kingdom of Guatemala in the 1790s and 1810s, Martha Few shows how an urban elite who saw themselves as propagators of enlightened humanitarianism orchestrated anti-epidemic measures, and places these specific responses within a broader story of the way the state inserted itself into the health and reproductive lives of its colonial subjects. In addition to measures including quarantines and inoculation programmes introduced by governments, Few places the varied responses to disease in their social context. The author explains Mesoamerican medical worlds at the village and parish level, and includes fascinating perspectives on rural communities and women. The chapters occasionally meander from the guiding thread of epidemic disease, but the relatively wide scope of the book does allow Few to present a great variety of intriguing case studies. This is a monograph that is both highly informative and eminently readable

Colonialism · Context (archaeology · Elite · Enlightenment · Ethnology · Humanity · Political science · Politics · Poverty · Sociology · Typhus · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History of Science and Medicine · History · Law