In Enlightened Immunity, Paul Ramírez takes us to colonial Mexico during the final decades of Spanish rule to document the introduction and reception of preventative measures in public health—from quarantines and cordons sanitaires to the rise of the novel technologies of inoculation and vaccination. The book builds on the literature on the Bourbon reforms to encompass the state’s heightened concern with the rational management of healthy populations as part of its broader experiment with enlightened statecraft. Seeking to understand how public-health campaigns operated “on the ground” in the absence of vast medical bureaucracies and infrastructure, Ramírez draws our attention to the multitude of actors, corporate bodies, and local communities that varyingly facilitated, mediated, questioned, and resisted new preventative measures. This is a history of Enlightenment medicine marked by “confusion, contradiction, and contestation,” a “story of false starts and minor victories as the ‘conquest’ of a particular disease” (16).

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