This book explores the pressing issues of border control and infectious disease from the nineteenth to present day. The book places world health in world history, microbes and their management in globalization, and disease in the history of international relations, bringing together leading scholars on the history and politics of global health.

Mexican American folk and religious healing, often referred to as curanderismo, has been a vital part of life in the Mexico-U.S. border region for centuries. A hybrid tradition made up primarily of indigenous and Iberian Catholic pharmacopeias, rituals, and notions of the self, curanderismo treats the sick person with a variety of healing modalities including herbal remedies, intercessory prayer, body massage, and energy manipulation. Curanderos, “healers,” embrace a holistic understanding of the patient, including body, soul, and community. Border Medicine examines the ongoing evolution of Mexican American religious healing from the end of the nineteenth century to the present. Illuminating the ways in which curanderismo has had an impact not only on the health and culture of the borderlands but also far beyond, the book tracks its expansion from Mexican American communities to Anglo and multiethnic contexts. While many healers treat Mexican and Mexican American clientele, a significant number of curanderos have worked with patients from other ethnic groups as well, especially those involved in North American metaphysical religions like spiritualism, mesmerism, New Thought, New Age, and energy-based alternative medicines. Hendrickson explores this point of contact as an experience of transcultural exchange. Drawing on historical archives, colonial-era medical texts and accounts, early ethnographies of the region, newspaper articles, memoirs, and contemporary healing guidebooks as well as interviews with contemporary healers, Border Medicine demonstrates the notable and ongoing influence of Mexican Americans on cultural and religious practices in the United States, especially in the American West.

The threat of global pandemic disease is currently mobilizing experts, governments, and the exploding industry in 'security'; and yet, this has all happened before. Medicine at the Border explores the pressing issues of border control and infectious disease in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The book places world health in world history, microbes and their management in globalization, and disease in the history of international relations, bringing together leading scholars on the history and politics of global health. The authors show how infectious disease has been central to the political, legal and commercial history of nationalism, colonialism and internationalism over the modern period.

Born of encounters between Indigenous women and Euro-American men in the first decades of the nineteenth century, the Plains Metis people occupied contentious geographic and cultural spaces. Living in a disputed area of the northern Plains inhabited by various Indigenous nations and claimed by both the United States and Great Britain, the Metis emerged as a people with distinctive styles of speech, dress, and religious practice, and occupational identities forged in the intense rivalries of the fur and provisions trade. Michel Hogue explores how, as fur trade societies waned and as state officials looked to establish clear lines separating the United States from Canada and Indians from non-Indians, these communities of mixed Indigenous and European ancestry were profoundly affected by the efforts of nation-states to divide and absorb the North American West. Grounded in extensive research in U.S. and Canadian archives, Hogue's account recenters historical discussions that have typically been confined within national boundaries and illuminates how Plains Indigenous peoples like the Metis were at the center of both the unexpected accommodations and the hidden history of violence that made the "world's longest undefended border."

Medical therapy, research and technology enable us to make our bodies, or parts of them, available to others in an increasing number of ways. This is the case in organ, tissue, egg and sperm donation as well as in surrogate motherhood and clinical research. Bringing together leading scholars working on the ethical, social and cultural aspects of such bodily exchanges, this cutting-edge book develops new ways of understanding them. Bodily Exchanges, Bioethics and Border Crossing both probes the established giving and selling frameworks for conceptualising bodily exchanges in medicine, and seeks to develop and examine another, less familiar framework: that of sharing. A framework of sharing can capture practices that involve giving up and giving away part of one’s body, such as organ and tissue donation, and practices that do not, such as surrogacy and research participation. Sharing also recognizes the multiple relationalities that these exchanges can involve and invites inquiry into the context in which they occur. In addition, the book explores the multiple forms of border crossing that bodily exchanges in medicine involve, from the physical boundaries of the body to relational borders – as can happen in surrogacy – to national borders and the range of ethical issues that these various border-crossings can give rise to. Engaging with anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and feminist and postcolonical perspectives, this is an original and timely contribution to contemporary bioethics in a time of increasing globalization. It will be of use to students and researchers from a range of humanities and social science backgrounds as well as medical and other healthcare professionals with an interest in bioethics.

Here is the first comprehensive cross-disciplinary work to examine the current health situation of our immigrants, successfully integrating the vast literature of diverse fields -- epidemiology, health services research, anthropology, law, medicine, social work, health promotion, and bioethics -- to explore the richness and diversity of the immigrant population from a culturally-sensitive perspective. This unequalled resource examines methodological issues, issues in clinical care and research, health and disease in specific immigrant populations, patterns of specific diseases in immigrant groups in the US, and conclusive insight towards the future. Complete with 73 illustrations, this singular book is the blueprint for where we must go in the future.