Book Review

摘要

In the past few decades, a rich body of scholarship has shed light on the complex interactions between colonial officials, international institutions and local actors that shaped the development of public health and medicine in colonial Africa and South Asia. Until recently, the Caribbean has remained something of a blind spot in this literature. That this neglect cannot be blamed on a lack of importance, sources, or good stories is made evident in Juanita de Barros and Sean Stilwell’s (Trenton, NJ: African World Press, 2016). Here we see questions of disease control and health policy becoming issues of imperial security, prompting riots, drawing in international actors and bringing officials into intimate contact with a range of colourful local characters such as ‘the Queen’, a woman accused of prostitution and forced into VD treatment but ultimately able to negotiate her release in the Dominican Republic under the occupation of the United States.