Published through the Early American Places initiative, supported
by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.Conquering Sickness presents a
comprehensive analysis of race, health, and colonization in a
specific cross-cultural contact zone in the Texas borderlands
between 1780 and 1861. Throughout this eighty-year period, ordinary
health concerns shaped cross-cultural interactions during Spanish,
Mexican, and Anglo colonization. Historians have shown us that
Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo American settlers in the contested
borderlands read the environment to determine how to live healthy,
productive lives. Colonizers similarly outlined a culture of
healthy living by observing local Native and Mexican populations.
For colonists, Texas residents' so-called immorality—evidenced by
their "indolence," "uncleanliness," and "sexual impropriety"—made
them unhealthy. In the Spanish and Anglo cases, the state made
efforts to reform Indians into healthy subjects by confining them
in missions or on reservations. Colonists' views of health were
taken as proof of their own racial superiority, on the one hand,
and of Native and Mexican inferiority, on the other, and justified
the various waves of conquest. As in other colonial settings,
however, the medical story of Texas colonization reveals colonial
contradictions. Mark Allan Goldberg analyzes how colonizing powers
evaluated, incorporated, and discussed local remedies. Conquering
Sickness reveals how health concerns influenced cross-cultural
relations, negotiations, and different forms of state formation.
Focusing on Texas, Goldberg examines the racialist thinking of the
region in order to understand evolving concepts of health, race,
and place in the nineteenth century borderlands.