While some of the world's population isolated to prevent COVID-19 from spreading, others were unable or unwilling to do so. Governments and international bodies made mercurial recommendations and sometimes laid down harsh mandates that were out of step with people's conditions of life. Only the most guileful would fail to acknowledge how race, ethnicity, class, region, age, sexuality, and gender shaped how one lived through or died with COVID. This well-researched book by David Carey Jr. is about the structural inequalities that affected health for Indigenous Guatemalans and Ecuadoreans in the early twentieth century. It is fitting that long sections of the book (including a cogent foreword by Jeremy A. Greene) discuss the pandemic.
Carey's argument can be summed up as follows. Medicine not only reflected but also reinforced, shaped, and was shaped by racism, sexism, and classism. Yet through contact, conflict, and collaboration, Indigenous Guatemalans and Ecuadoreans influenced modern...