Jonathan M. Weber. Death Is All around Us: Corpses, Chaos, and Public Health in Porfirian Mexico City. The Mexican Experience Series. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. Illustrations, maps. 294 pp. $30.00 (e-book), ISBN 978-1-4962-1434-8; $50.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8032-8466-1; $30.00 (paper), ISBN 978-1-4962-1344-0.
Reviewed by Elizabeth O'Brien (Johns Hopkins University)
Published on H-LatAm (September, 2020)
Commissioned by Casey M. Lurtz (Johns Hopkins University)
Death Is All around Us is a deeply researched study of Porfirian technocratic approaches to the management of corpses and cadavers. Covering many facets of this topic—such as corpse transportation, dissection, coffins, cremation, and cemeteries—this work takes a novel approach to the exciting scholarly conversation on death, funerary rituals, and death cults in the making of modern Mexico. With a keen focus on the site-specific use of technology, Jonathan M. Weber’s work makes for fascinating dialogue with Claudio Lomnitz’s classic, Death and the Idea of Mexico (2005). Clearly written and largely devoid of jargon, Death Is All around Us will be a valuable resource for researchers and historians of Porfirian technology, state-building, and public health.
Weber argues that “Porfirian officials created a discourse that linked death, public health, medical science, and technology into a cohesive narrative that promoted Mexico City as a model of modernity for the rest of the country” (p. 13). And yet this symbolic assertion of modern state power over the dead, according to our author, was a failed endeavor. In his words, “the attempt by Porfirian state officials to capture modernity or any one of its synonyms, such as order and progress, should be viewed as the metaphoric dog that chases its own tail” (p. 21). Although histories of technology are not always (or most usefully) framed in terms of success and failure, Weber makes a strong case that the management of dead bodies was a problem in Porfirian Mexico City, especially at the beginning of the Díaz regime. If these Porfirian statistics can be accepted uncritically, we learn that in 1876 one in nineteen people perished prematurely in Mexico’s capital of 250,000 inhabitants. This, according to Weber, made it “one of the most unsanitary places in the Western world” (p. 2). Working under the Superior Sanitation Council, sanitary officials set out to replicate the public health and sanitary changes that had swept much of the world during the last half of the nineteenth century; they aimed to conceive of, and agitate toward, a kind of hygienic and responsible citizen of the capital city.
The first chapter discusses a range of new regulations, first introduced in 1887, for the hygienic transportation of corpses. The chapter assesses those efforts and traces the structural circumstances that led to, in Weber’s eyes, eventual sanitary failures of the state. Even after Díaz’s Superior Sanitation Council constructed corpse deposits throughout the city, bodies spilled onto streets and became a health hazard. This was partially because burial fees remained high after their transfer from religious corporations to the state, and most residents could not afford the cost of a good burial in a coveted location. Building on other analyses of Porfirian railroads, Weber showcases how trains were used to move corpses in and out of the city, ostensibly to protect residents from disease and decay. Weber’s analysis is interesting for how it paints trains not only as symbols of progress but also as arbiters of death. Here the author introduces the concept of the hygienic railroad—and by extension, the electric tram, which became part of the cityscape by 1910.
The material in Weber’s second chapter will perhaps be more familiar to historians of medicine and public health. Here he examines how medical education became intertwined with a particular discourse on the regenerative (and even redemptive) value of modern, professional, and scientifically informed physicians. Yet even here Weber adds to previous studies—most recently, Luz María Hernández Sáenz’s excellent 2018 book, Carving a Niche: The Medical Profession in Mexico 1800-1870—by offering glimpses into the somewhat elusive details of dissection and cadaver care in the national medical school. A main goal of the chapter is to contextualize the modernizing efforts of Eduardo Licéaga, who was President Díaz’s personal physician. Licéaga emphasized an empirical approach to medical education, articulated through Professor Francisco de P. Chacón’s customary refrain: “The cadaver is the best textbook” (p. 113). The introduction of dissection into the formalized and standardized curriculum, together with the creation of the national anatomy museum and a cadaver department, all aided Licéaga’s efforts. Dissection even allowed doctors to investigate the prevalence in Mexico of the recently discovered Beriberi disease, and contributed to the acceptance of Robert Koch’s germ theory of disease. One small critique here is that Weber’s section on “medicine as the new religion” leaves a good deal of room for more commentary; in comparison, chapter 4’s discussion of religion and cremation is more replete.
The third chapter of this book is its most original. It patiently excavates patent archives held at the Archivo General de la Nación, and in so doing, uncovers the history of funerary technologies and corpse-preservation techniques. Another strength of this chapter is its deep engagement with the history of the dead in other regions of the world. Some detail is given, for example, on the French doctor Theodor Noualhier’s 1857 method for “electroplating” bodies. This consisted of coating the corpse in silver nitrate (which acted as an electrical conductor and natural microbial agent), submerging the body in bath of copper sulfate, and then applying a galvanic current in order to establish a metallic deposit of copper along the body, thereby creating a metallic mummy. As one might imagine, these passages, and the accompanying images, make for macabre reading—even for historians of medicine. Perhaps a more reflective approach to postmortem photography could have shifted the tenor of this discussion. Finally, in this chapter Weber analyzes Mexican innovations in creating hermetic coffins, burial vaults, and methods for topical embalming and arterial embalming. Fashionable coffins, lined with silk and adorned with jewelry, enabled Mexicans to perpetuate the extension of class divisions from life to death.
Chapter 4, “Undermining Progress: Workers, Citizens, and the Moral Economy of Death,” sets about to deepen the book’s analysis of how ordinary citizens chose to deal with death in ways that made sense to them. While the work certainly shows that Porfirian sanitary regulations were difficult to enforce, its analysis of a popular moral economy around death could have used more engagement with related scholarship. Weber is more comfortable with the history of technology than social history—and understandably so, considering the level of technical knowledge required for other chapters. Even so, this chapter offers tantalizing portraits of how cemeteries became contested spaces in which commoners exerted autonomy in the face of a rapidly modernizing state.
Death Is All around Us draws on and contributes to foundational scholarship on Porfirian public health by Claudia Agostoni, Ana María Carrillo, Pablo Piccatto, Katherine Bliss, and others. It is also inspired by the conceptual frameworks set out by Michel Foucault, James Scott, Bruno Latour, and Nayan Shah, and situates itself neatly within the historiography of science and technology studies. Weber succeeds in showcasing Porfirian Mexico’s unique history of corpse management, and the work will be a useful resource for historians of public health and sanitation in other regions, too. The themes at hand—trust in authority (or lack thereof), autonomy of the people, moral economies of life and death, and the disposal of the dead—are all too relevant in light of the public health crisis that currently rages in the Americas.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-latam.
Citation:
Elizabeth O'Brien. Review of Weber, Jonathan M., Death Is All around Us: Corpses, Chaos, and Public Health in Porfirian Mexico City.
H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews.
September, 2020.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=54501
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. |