A history of epidemics and disease prevention in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Mexico, Enlightened Immunity focuses on the multiethnic and multimedia production of medical knowledge in a time when the governance of healthy populations was central to the pursuits of absolutist monarchies. The book reconstructs the cultural, ritual, and political background of Mexico’s early experiments with childhood vaccines, tracing how the public health response to epidemic disease was thoroughly enmeshed with religion and the church, the spread of Enlightenment ideas about medicine and the body, ... More

A history of epidemics and disease prevention in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Mexico, Enlightened Immunity focuses on the multiethnic and multimedia production of medical knowledge in a time when the governance of healthy populations was central to the pursuits of absolutist monarchies. The book reconstructs the cultural, ritual, and political background of Mexico’s early experiments with childhood vaccines, tracing how the public health response to epidemic disease was thoroughly enmeshed with religion and the church, the spread of Enlightenment ideas about medicine and the body, and the customs and healing practices of indigenous villages. It was not only educated urban elites—doctors and men of science—whose response to outbreaks of disease mattered. Rather, the cast of protagonists crossed ethnic, gender, and class lines: local officials who decided if and how to execute plans that came from Mexico City, rural priests who influenced local practices, peasants and artisans who reckoned with the consequences of quarantine, and Indian tributaries who decided if they would hand their children to vaccinators. By following the public response to anticontagion measures and smallpox vaccine in colonial Mexico, Enlightened Immunity sheds light on fundamental questions about trust, uncertainty, and the role of religion in a period of medical discovery, innovation, and modernization.