Modern Colonization By Medical Intervention

Modern Colonization by Medical Intervention adds to our understanding of the political and economic transformations establishing colonial modernity in Puerto Rico. By focusing on influential physicians’ clinical work and their access to a remote and inaccessible rural population, this volume details how rural areas suffered the ravages of social dislocation, unemployment and hunger. The colonial administration’s hookworm campaign involved many Puerto Rican physicians in complex struggles with other elites, rural peasants and U.S. colonial administrators for political legitimacy. Puerto Rican physicians did not gain the professional autonomy their counterparts in the United States enjoyed. Instead, they became centrally implicated in the struggle between labor and capital enforcing the island’s subordination to a colonial modernity and the development of capitalism on the island.

By the end of the eighteenth century, Peru had witnessed the decline of its once-thriving silver industry, and it had barely begun to recover from massive population losses due to smallpox and other diseases. At the time, it was widely believed that economic salvation was contingent upon increasing the labor force and maintaining as many healthy workers as possible. In Medicine and Politics in Colonial Peru,Adam Warrenpresents a groundbreaking study of the primacy placed on medical care to generate population growth during this era. The Bourbon reforms of the eighteenth century shaped many of the political, economic, and social interests of Spain and its colonies. In Peru, local elites saw the reforms as an opportunity to positively transform society and its conceptions of medicine and medical institutions in the name of the Crown. Creole physicians in particular, took advantage of Bourbon reforms to wrest control of medical treatment away from the Catholic Church, establish their own medical expertise, and create a new, secular medical culture. They asserted their new influence by treating smallpox and leprosy, by reforming medical education, and by introducing hygienic routines into local funeral rites, among other practices. Later, during the early years of independence, government officials began to usurp the power of physicians and shifted control of medical care back to the church. Creole doctors, without the support of the empire, lost much of their influence, and medical reforms ground to a halt. As Warren’s study reveals, despite falling in and out of political favor, Bourbon reforms and creole physicians were instrumental to the founding of modern medicine in Peru, and their influence can still be felt today.

"Raising the Living Dead is a new history of Puerto Rico's carceral rehabilitation system in the middle decades of the twentieth century that brings to life the interactions of incarcerated people, their wider social networks, and health care professionals. The book addresses key issues in the history of prisons and the histories of medicine and belief, including how prisoners' different racial, class, and cultural identities shaped their incarceration and how professionals living in a colonial society dealt with the challenge of rehabilitating prisoners for citizenship. The main idea of the book is that, in the region, multiple communities of care came together both inside and outside of prisons to imagine and imperfectly enact solution-oriented cultures of rehabilitation. Specifically, Alberto Ortiz Díaz argues that scientific and humanistic approaches to well-being were deliberately fused to raise the "living dead" (an expression that reemerged in the modern Caribbean to refer to prisoners). These reform groups sought to raise incarcerated people physically, mentally, socially, spiritually, and civically. The book is based on deep, original archival research into the Oso Blanco (White Bear) penitentiary in Puerto Rico, yet it situates its study within Puerto Rico's broader carceral archipelago and other Caribbean prisons. The agents of this history include not only physical health professionals, but also their mental health counterparts (psychologists and psychiatrists), social workers, spiritual and religious practitioners, and, of course, the prisoners and their families. By following all these groups and emphasizing the interpersonal exercise of power, Ortiz Díaz is able to tell a story that goes beyond structural and social control debates. Raising the Living Dead is not just about convicts, their immediate interlocutors, and their contexts, however, but about how together these open a window into the history of social uplift projects within the (neo)colonial societies of the Caribbean. There is no book like this in Caribbean historiography and few examine these themes in the larger literature on the history of prisons"--

A provocative, breath-taking, and concise relational history of colonialism over the past 500 years, from the dawn of the New World to the twenty-first century.

As medical science progressed through the nineteenth century, the United States was at the forefront of public health initiatives across the Americas. Dreadful sanitary conditions were relieved, lives were saved, and health care developed into a formidable institution throughout Latin America as doctors and bureaucrats from the United States flexed their scientific muscle. This wasn't a purely altruistic enterprise, however, as Jose Amador reveals in Medicine and Nation Building in the Americas, 1890-1940. Rather, these efforts almost served as a precursor to modern American interventionism. For places like Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Brazil, these initiatives were especially invasive. Drawing on sources in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Brazil, and the United States, Amador shows that initiatives launched in colonial settings laid the foundation for the rise of public health programs in the hemisphere and transformed debates about the formation of national culture. Writers rethought theories of environmental and racial danger, while Cuban reformers invoked the yellow fever campaign to exclude nonwhite immigrants. Puerto Rican peasants flooded hookworm treatment stations, and Brazilian sanitarians embraced regionalist and imperialist ideologies. Together, these groups illustrated that public health campaigns developed in the shadow of empire propelled new conflicts and conversations about achieving modernity and progress in the tropics. This book is a recipient of the annual Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Prize for the best project in the area of medicine.

This book examines the colonial structure as it applies to Latine populations and demonstrates how the remnants of that structure continue to affect this ethnic group. It will show that the colonial perspective is aligned with a racist viewpoint and the many ways in which this undermines psychological stability. Currently, many psychologists dealing with this population focus on individual deficits or disorders without the clarifying lens of social justice. In this way, the book will unravel the various strands of socio-political stressors and the disabling effects of lingering oppression. It will serve to bring new insights to those studying this group, as well as the many mental health workers that provide services. The result is an identification of a native psychology that is uniquely tailored to these particular individuals.

In recent decades, there has been considerable interest in writing histories of medicine that capture local, regional, and global dimensions of health and health care in the same frame. Exploring changing patterns of disease and different systems of medicine across continents and countries, A Global History of Medicine provides a rich introduction to this emergent field. The introductory chapter addresses the challenges of writing the history of medicine across space and time and suggests ways in which tracing the entangled histories of the patchworks of practice that have constituted medicine allow us to understand how healing traditions are always plural, permeable, and shaped by power and privilege. Written by scholars from around the world and accompanied by suggestions for further reading, individual chapters explore historical developments in health, medicine, and disease in China, the Islamic World, North and Latin America, Africa, South-east Asia, Western and Eastern Europe, and Australia and New Zealand. The final chapter focuses on smallpox eradication and reflects on the sources and methods necessary to integrate local and global dimensions of medicine more effectively. Collectively, the contributions to A Global History of Medicine will not only be invaluable to undergraduate and postgraduate students seeking to expand their knowledge of health and medicine across time, but will also provide a constructive theoretical and empirical platform for future scholarship.

This volume provides a broad and critical presentation of the behavioral and psychosocial treatments of Latinxs with dementia in the United States (U.S.) and across a representative sample of Spanish-speaking countries in the world. The compendium of chapters, written by researchers, practitioners, and policy analysts from multiple disciplines provides a deep exploration of the current state of dementia care for Latinxs in the U.S. and around the globe. The volume is designed to increase and strengthen the collective scientific and sociocultural understanding of the epidemiological and biopsychosocial factors, as well as the overlapping systemic challenges that impact diagnosis and symptom management of Latinxs with dementia. The authors introduce policy options to reduce risk factors for dementia and present culturally-responsive interventions that meet the needs of Latinx patients and their caregivers. Highlighted topics featured in the book include: Contextual, cultural, and socio-political issues of Latinxs with dementia. New meta-analysis of dementia rates in the Americas and Caribbean. Dementia-related behavioral issues and placement considerations. Educational, diagnostic, and supportive psychosocial interventions. Pharmacological, non-pharmacological, and ethnocultural healthcare interventions. Intersectionality as a practice of dementia care for sexual and gender minoritized Latinxs. Prescriptions for policy and programs to empower older Latinxs and their families. Caring for Latinxs with Dementia in a Globalized World: Behavioral and Psychosocial Treatments is a resource that accentuates and contextualizes the heterogeneity in nationality, immigration, race, sexual orientation, gender, and political realities. It is a key reference for a wide range of fields inclusive of demography, geriatrics, gerontology, medicine, mental health, neurology, neuropsychology, nursing, occupational therapy, pharmacology, psychiatry, psychology, rehabilitation, social work, sociology, and statistics all of which, collectively, bear on the problem and the solutions for better care for Latinxs affected by dementia.