Historians in print are something like witnesses in court: they testify to what they have seen in the archives, regarding matters that we (as readers) cannot readily verify as we read them. The documents historians rely on are generally accessible only when we can travel to archives and other repositories to see the primary sources ourselves. So it is troubling when an author makes mistakes with factual matters that can be easily checked in published sources. How historians treat their secondary sources can be an important clue as to whether they are expert witnesses or unreliable narrators.
Early on in this book, we are told that Mexico City's Santa Paula Cemetery “dated back to 1836, when Archbishop Don Alonso Núñez de Haro y Peralta established it as a location for the burial of the poor who had died at Hospital San Andres, one of the church hospitals in the city” (39). This would have been impossible, because Núñez de Haro died some 36 years earlier, in 1800. Weber cites Manuel Rivera Cambas in México pintoresco, but Rivera Cambas had described the archbishop dedicating the cemetery 50 years earlier, on the morning of February 25, 1786, in an elaborate ceremony amid a distinguished crowd. This burial ground was one of Mexico City's earliest suburban cemeteries and was dedicated for those who died in the Hospital of San Andrés, which Núñez de Haro had founded as Mexico's first general hospital, in 1779. Archbishop Núñez de Haro was an important figure in the history of public health in eighteenth-century Mexico.
Weber is also apparently unaware of the international history of public health in the nineteenth century. For example, he states that the germ theory of disease was “first developed in 1883 by German physician Robert Koch” (109). Although Koch was a major figure in the development of germ theory, he did not come up with it on his own—it was an international and an interdisciplinary effort. Louis Pasteur, the French chemist, may deserve priority, and certainly a mention, along with John Tyndall, an English physicist, and Joseph Lister, an English surgeon. Others also made significant contributions. It would be better to think of the germ theory evolving over decades rather than being created ex nihilo by a single individual in a particular year.
Overall, the book suffers from a lack of proportionality between its weighty concepts and the thin evidence employed to support them. Patent archives are full of inventions that never proved practicable, but Weber elaborates on six contraptions (some of them rather gruesome) to exemplify “modernity.” In another chapter, a handful of random burials is expected to bear the weight of a “moral economy.” A single anonymous article in an English-language newspaper is given more attention than the two existing volumes about Hospital Juárez.
Throughout the book, there are strange monetary comparisons of something Weber sometimes calls “historical opportunity cost” and other times “contemporary opportunity cost.” Price theory does include a concept called “opportunity cost,” but it does not involve inflating historical prices, which is what these reckonings appear to be. Weber does not explain his calculations or his sources, other than to mention the peso-to-US dollar exchange rate, again without attribution. Pesky inaccuracies abound. “Cement” and “concrete” are frequently confounded in everyday language, but a historian of technology should not confuse the two. Personal names, in both English and Spanish, are muddled. The title of Claudio Lomnitz's book is misstated.
Given the importance of cemeteries in the history of public health, we need to know much more about when and how they were moved out of the cities, who made those decisions, and how the public reacted (in some places, the campos santos were moved out of urban areas decades before the cemeteries were secularized). We need careful, detailed explanations of how death, burials, and public health changed in nineteenth-century Mexico. This is not that book.
