Fevered Measures: Public Health and Race at the Texas-Mexico Border, 1848-1942

Abstract

John McKiernan-González has written an excellent history of public health along the Texas–Mexico border from the era of Mexican independence until World War II. In fascinating chapters that cover the racial consequences of quarantines and vaccinations, Fevered Measures argues that various “public health campaigns provide a rich staging ground for encounters between medical professionals, political authorities, and working-class residents” (2). They also reveal the interplay of local, national, and international histories, as well as the making of ethnic, class, and political identities in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands. To borderlands historians, McKiernan-González's discussion of efforts by American officials to assert national sovereignty through the construction of one kind of border or another will feel familiar, as will his analyses of persistent discrimination against nonwhites, unpredictable alliances across racial and class lines, and tensions between actors operating on different geographic scales. But they will learn a great deal about how these issues were both cause and effect of broader changes within the public health profession. Likewise, historians of public health know about the movement of scientific discoveries between Europe and the Americas, the history of inoculation against various diseases, and the professionalization of public health during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But Fevered Measures offers an enlightening account of how the border region often became a laboratory for experimentation by public health officials. By bringing these histories together, Fevered Measures provides several new vantage points for understanding both historical fields.