Book Review

This addition to the literature is especially welcome, since, compared to most of Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean is a region that is understudied by historians of healthcare and medicine. This audacious set of consistently high-quality essays aims to introduce readers to a wide diversity of issues with regard not only to the Spanish-, English-, French-, Danishand Dutch-speaking Caribbean, but also the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico. The themes broached by the volume range from the control of midwifery and obstetrics, to environmental and occupational health in the mining sector, and from debates over control and repression of prostitution to the evolution of infant welfare. The editors are only too aware of the risk that the book would be as fragmented as the region. They confront this problem head-on by writing an invaluable introduction that synthesises the state of the subject most effectively, and which places the evolution of the Caribbean historiography of health and medicine within a global framework, that places a special emphasis upon Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. The bulk of the book consists of essays that examine problems in specific islands and territories, apart from one chapter that looks at the French Antilles in general. A focus on gender is one continuous theme of the book: the history of women and children in the region is approached through such topics as the evolution of health services for women in Trinidad and Tobago, and of infant welfare in British Guiana; but men are not overlooked, with one chapter addressing the production of Cuban medicine during the nineteenth century, and another inquiring into the impact of the First World War in the French Antilles and looking especially at military medicine. A second theme that is fruitfully explored throughout the book is interactions between the islands and territories of the circum-Caribbean and the dominant powers in the region. This reader found especially rewarding the accounts of tensions between local medical elites and US occupying forces in the Dominican Republic between 1916 and 1924 over the handling of prostitution, and the analysis of conflicts involving local physicians and the US colonial government over the conceptualisation and formulation of policies of professionalisation after the occupation of 1898. Fascinating, too, is an essay investigating the impact of antihookworm campaigns led by the Rockefeller Foundation in the Dutch colony of Suriname in the early twentieth century. It seems that the Rockefeller Foundation could count on more consistent and reliable co-operation from independent governments in Mexico and Colombia than a European colonial administration in Suriname. One underlying theme that recurs throughout the book is poverty and lack of resources. The Danes in St Croix stigmatised enslaved midwives and blamed them when deaths occurred, but failed to fund the training of either the slaves or of other women. The regional government in Yucatán went to considerable pains in 1933 to impose more legal requirements than before on titled physicians, but lacked the resources and political will to rein in the operations of ‘charlatans’ without titles who served a large part of the population. The evolution of infant welfare services in British Guiana after the abolition of slavery was so gradual as to be close to imperceptible for want of resources both material and human. This new work is so successful that a sequel looking more closely at the period since the