Maternal Judgments

Allyson M. Poska is a professor emerita of history at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Her most recent book is Gendered Crossings: Women and Migration in the Spanish Empire, which was awarded the Best Book Prize from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women.

“A significant contribution to the history of medicine and empire. . . . Poska shifts attention from traditional narratives of scientific progress to examine the gendered dimensions of Spain’s Royal Vaccination Expedition. By recovering the experiences of women and children who served as vaccine carriers and local intermediaries, she argues that their participation—often negotiated under conditions of coercion—proved fundamental to the campaign’s implementation across Spanish territories in the early nineteenth century.” —Martha Few, author of For All of Humanity: Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala“Maternal Judgments introduces readers to some of the unknown, unsung women who labored on behalf of cowpox vaccine in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Spain and Spanish America. Hailing from every caste and class background, these women were mothers, caretakers, promoters, and occasionally practitioners of a novel preventive technique. Considering the importance of women as healers in the early modern world, we need more such approaches to public health in a global perspective. In the hands of Allyson Poska, their stories illuminate worlds beyond, including the experiences of single women in Spain and female transatlantic migration. In short, Maternal Judgments stands to make contributions to the study of women and gender, the history of medicine and the Spanish Empire, and histories of childhood, as the book thoughtfully unfolds the roles that children played as carriers of the vaccine lymph in their bodies.” —Paul Ramírez, author of Enlightened Immunity: Mexico's Experiments with Disease Prevention in the Age of Reason