| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

David S. Jones. Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality since 1600. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2004. Pp. xii, 294. $ 49.95.

David S. Jones, in this revision of his 2001 dissertation, admits at the outset that he did not intend to write a systematic history of epidemics and their impact on Amerindians. Instead he provides a provocative examination of health disparities between them and the newly arrived European settlers. He is interested in both the reaction of Amerindians and Europeans to the epidemics that buffeted Native American populations, and how their responses changed from the 1600s to the twentieth century. By "rationalization," Jones means how people at the time tried to explain disparities in morbidity and mortality between the two groups. Admittedly influenced by the "new Indian history," he vividly probes the nature of the understanding of both Amerindians and outsiders, through "sophisticated analysis of the 'middle ground' on which both groups interacted" (p. 8). He does so by examination of four case studies: first, what were the responses to epidemics and rapid depopulation in the first decades of New England settlement; second, what was done to propagate or block the spread of smallpox into the frontier in the half century after 1760; third, what explains the appearance of, and then attempts to manage, tuberculosis on Sioux reservations in the late 1800s; and fourth, what is the nature and response to modern medicine and "health research on the Navajo reservation in the 1950s and 1960s?" (p. 15). Jones devotes two chapters to each case study, the first exploring the issue, the second probing the responses and nature of the disparities between Amerindian health and that of the general U.S. population.

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