Published through the Early American Places initiative, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Conquering Sickness presents a comprehensive analysis of race, health, and colonization in a specific cross-cultural contact zone in the Texas borderlands between 1780 and 1861. Throughout this eighty-year period, ordinary health concerns shaped cross-cultural interactions during Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo colonization.


Historians have shown us that Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo American settlers in the contested borderlands read the environment to determine...