Overview

In the mid-twentieth century, Mexico became a hub for global experiments in public health and social science. Best known as the birthplace of the Green Revolution, Mexico also pioneered the first large-scale effort to train community health workers to combine Western medical practices with Indigenous healing traditions. The Power to Harm and Heal uncovers how that groundbreaking program, led by the state-run Instituto Nacional Indigenista, reshaped healthcare across rural Mexico. Drawing on archival sources and oral histories, Joshua Mentanko illuminates the lives and labors of the early intercultural health workers who toiled in this program decades before international health agencies adopted similar models. Mentanko also examines the complex relationships between policymakers, scientists, and the communities they aimed to serve, and how medicine became a tool for both nation-building and cultural negotiation. Further connecting Mexico’s rural health initiatives to shifting global geopolitics, Mentanko elucidates how such initiatives emerged alongside decolonization movements and Third World struggles for economic development. Placing intercultural medicine at the center of debates surrounding modernization, Indigenous rights, and the global history of primary care, The Power to Harm and Heal reveals the critical roles Indigenous people—as western and traditional medicine practitioners and patients—played in the creation, development, and resistance to the shifting practice of medicine.

Full Product Details

9781469692432

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Reviews

""A novel and compelling history of traditional medicine in Mexico that centers and critically evaluates Indigenous agency in histories of development, science and medicine, and the Global South.""--Sarah Foss, Oklahoma State University ""An original study of political and economic rationales that guided state policy on traditional medicine in twentieth-century Mexico. An important contribution.""--Claudia Agostoni, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

Author Information

Joshua Mentanko is a historian and practitioner of applied social science research at Erasmus University.

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