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Inspired by Michel Foucault’s writings about biopolitics and biopower, Cohen traces the migration of immunity from politics and law into the domains of medicine and science. Offering a genealogy of the concept, he illuminates a complex of thinking about modern bodies that percolates through European political, legal, philosophical, economic, governmental, scientific, and medical discourses from the mid-seventeenth century through the twentieth. He shows that by the late nineteenth century, “the body” literally incarnates modern notions of personhood. In this lively cultural rumination, Cohen argues that by embracing the idea of immunity-as-defense so exclusively, biomedicine naturalizes the individual as the privileged focus for identifying and treating illness, thereby devaluing or obscuring approaches to healing situated within communities or collectives.

Alcohol in Ancient Mexico reconstructs the variety and extent of distillation traditions in the ancient cultures of Mexico, describing in detail the various plants and processes used to make such beverages, their prevalence, and their significance for local culture.

The art of distillation arrived in Mexico with the Spaniards in the sixteenth century. However, well before that time, native skills and available resources had contributed to a well-developed tradition of intoxicating beverages, many of which are still produced and consumed.

In the 1930’s Henry Bruman visited various Mexican and Central American Indian tribes to reconstruct the variety and extent of these ancient traditions. He discerned five distinct areas defined by the culturally most significant beverages, all superimposed over the great mescal wine region. Within these five areas he noted wine made from cactus, cactus fruit, cornstalks, and mesquite pods; beer from sprouted maize; and fermented sap from pulque agaves.

Outside the mescal region he observed widespread consumption in the Yucatan of a wine made from fermented honey and balché bark, plus lesser-known beverages in other regions. He also observed the frequent inclusion in the fermentation process of alkaloid-bearing ingredients such as peyote and tobacco, plants whose roots or bark contain saponins—which act as cardiac poisons—and even poisons from certain toads.

Alcohol in Ancient Mexico also considers the relative absence of alcoholic drink in the southwestern United States, the introduction of sills following the Spanish conquest, and possible sources for the introduction of coconut wine.

Previously unpublished, the research presented here retains its relevance today, and the photographs offer a fascinating glimpse at a traditional world that has now almost vanished.

Kibong’oto Hospital, opened in 1926, is an East African tuberculosis treatment center located on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro. Its history is crucial to understanding tuberculosis in Tanzania and, more broadly, in Africa. With the hospital as a point of departure, Christoph Gradmann presents a history of this disease that engages with local and regional contexts rather than with international elite science and health policies.

The book addresses key questions about the African experience with tuberculosis:

• What did it mean to do clinical science on tuberculosis in colonial and postcolonial contexts?
• Along which trajectories did medical practice and research evolve in a place where international advances in medical science were sometimes heard of only faintly and where resources could be scarce?
• How did a large hospital with several hundred beds dedicated to the treatment of just one condition figure in the development of national and regional health systems?
• How did Kibong’oto Hospital, a pride of colonial health governance, transition after Tanzania gained independence?
• How did treating and researching tuberculosis change throughout the twentieth century in an African hospital dedicated to that condition?
• How did research at the hospital contribute to tuberculosis-control strategies on national and international levels?

The book is based on the hospital’s unique archive: its surviving library of thousands of case summaries. Since 1926, this library has documented an enormous number of patient lives, staff careers, diagnoses, treatments, clinical trials, and much more. For today’s readers, the library provides insight into a history of clinical medicine in Africa, for which very few comparable archives exist. Gradmann supplements this site-specific research with material from national and international archives, as well as interviews with former staff involved in that history. The book’s four chapters offer perspectives on colonial epidemiological research in the interwar years; on late colonial healthcare development plans and the arrival of modern drug therapies; on the role of a national tuberculosis hospital in a newly independent country; and on the history of tuberculosis control in an age of economic crisis, HIV, and emergent global health-treatment programs. Finally, Gradmann discusses what the history of a large hospital can add to today’s tuberculosis research, control policy, and historiography.