In For All of Humanity: Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala, Martha Few offers several important contributions to the literature on science and medicine in the Spanish Empire. Through her analysis of local scientific and medical initiatives in the Kingdom of Guatemala in the late colonial period, she demonstrates the importance of this region as an intellectual centre implementing its own anti-epidemic campaigns prior to the mandates instigated by the Spanish Crown as part of the Bourbon Reforms. At the time of the Reforms, the Guatemalans already had a number of local programmes in place, developed and executed by local institutions, such as the University of San Carlos, the Guatemalan Protomedicato (a medical board) and the Royal Economic Society. These acts included such measures as quarantine and fumigation against the transference of typhus and protection against the spread of smallpox through first inoculation and later vaccination programmes. In some cases, Guatemalan initiatives pre-dated the Bourbon Reforms by nearly two decades, which brings the author to situate the exertion of an Enlightenment vision of public health reform in the hands of the Guatemalan elite rather than the Spanish Crown. By illuminating the limitations of imperial directives in the development of colonial medicine, Few contributes an important corrective to this literature.

Few provides a critical assessment of how the Guatemalan elite presented themselves as humanitarian rationalists carrying out an Enlightenment vision of medicine, capable of eliminating devastating epidemics, such as smallpox and typhus, at a time when Spanish imperial power was declining. Few's accounts centre on the period of the 1790s to the 1810s, concluding just a few years before the Guatemalans declared their independence from Spain in 1821. The successful administration of public health programmes to eradicate disease centred on Enlightenment values was also a demonstration of Guatemalan parentalism. The colonial officials, physicians, clergy and other intellectuals involved in this enterprise promoted their treatments in instructional pamphlets and in articles in the Economic Society's popular newspaper, Gazeta de Guatemala, further asserting their image of enlightened medical experts to a large circulation of readers. As Few discusses, these medical technologies did not contradict imperial medicine but were instead a statement of Guatemala situating itself as an enlightened nation.

Beneath the enlightened discourses and largely humanitarian aims of the colonial health reforms, however, were also darker elements of subjugation and coercion. As the colonial doctor Pedro Molina instructed his replacement, these health campaigns were ‘for their [the Mesoamericans'] benefit, even if they were not capable of understanding them’ (p. 196). Interestingly, it was only after obstacles of defiance that bilingual ladinos were appointed as translators in the second campaign, so these initial measures must have been enacted in a great state of confusion and anguish. The orchestrators of the first campaign were surprised when they met reluctance to what they viewed as a humanitarian intervention. Families were torn apart through inoculation and quarantine measures conducted in the casas de los enfermos, patrolled restricted spaces, where no one was allowed to exit or enter freely. Sometimes healthy children entered the casa del enfermo and did not return, perishing from the smallpox inoculations. In response, the indigenous peoples sent their children away under the cover of darkness and attempted to flee from hospitals themselves. When faced with resistance from the Mesoamericans to the application of their reforms, Creole colonial officials responded with militarized campaigns to burn infected homes and to destroy alternative treatments for smallpox preferred by the Mayans, such as temascales (sweat lodges). Forced medical procedures approved by the colonial administration were performed on subjugated indigenous populations under duress by militia soldiers in an absolutist fashion.

Few's chapter on constructing colonial foetuses provides an especially vivid portrayal of the extension of state control over the individual's body, and one that I would also recommend to historians with research interests in generation and reproduction and the medicalization of the body. The health reforms commanded that all souls should be baptized, including the foetuses from women who died during pregnancy. It was imperative that women of child-bearing age who contracted smallpox were identified as they were prone to miscarrying, and the faster the caesarean was performed the more likely a live extraction of the foetus would be achieved. The status of slavery began with the foetus, which could be bought and sold, and in a bill of sale the widow Dona Manuela sold one of her slave's unborn, ‘I acknowledge that the designated little mulata slave has been sold [for 25 silver pesos] since she existed in her mother's uterus’ (p. 130). In this way, Few demonstrates how wombs were sometimes viewed as ‘biological jails’ (p. 114) and illustrative of the broader narrative of the biopolitical identity of the colonial subject. On this matter, I would also direct readers to Few's earlier book, Women Who Live Evil Lives: Gender, Religion and the Politics of Power in Colonial Guatemala (2002), in which she explores women's engagement in healing illnesses and navigating pregnancy and childbirth through Inquisition records from Santiago de Guatemala.

In conclusion, Few offers insights into a number of areas to which we do not often gain access, such as Mesoamerican healing traditions, rural customs and interactions between religious, medical and government authorities in colonial Guatemala. She delivers a rich and complex narrative through a careful consultation of a wide array of sources, including articles from the Gazeta de Guatemala, state decrees, travel accounts, instructional pamphlets and criminal trials. She discusses the hybridity of medical knowledge created at the levels of interaction amongst diverse Mesoamerican cultures, the exchange between these cultures and the colonists, and the colonists’ engagement with prominent European Enlightenment scholars. She provides accounts of how medical practitioners, such as multi-ethnic lay healers, Guatemalan doctors and priest botanists, responded to the necessity of the preservation of life, both mortal and eternal. I would recommend this book to historians with interests in gender studies, empire, science and medicine.