Mark Allan Goldberg is an assistant professor of history at the University of Houston.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroductionA Note on Racial and Ethnic TerminologyChapter 1: Medicine and Spanish Conquest: Health and Healing in Late Colonial TexasChapter 2: The Health of the Missions: Spanish Friars, Coastal Indians, and Missionization in the Gulf CoastChapter 3: Cholera and Nation: Epidemic Disease, Healing, and State Formation in Northern MexicoChapter 4: Making Healthy American Settlements: U.S. Expansion and Anglo American, Comanche, and Black Slave Health in Nineteenth-Century Central Texas Chapter 5: Healthy Anglos, Unhealthy Mexicans: Health, Race, and Medicine in South TexasEpilogueBibliographyIndex

"Taking up a history with a number of diverse actors and epistemologies, Goldberg demonstrates the ways in which native, European, Mexican, and US health practices were deeply entangled, even as the framework of health was repeatedly marshalled in the service of conquest. Conquering Sickness . . . illuminates a cruel paradox: oppressed communities produced medical knowledge that buttressed both the authority of colonial medicine and the health of colonists, who in turn used ideologies of wellness to conquer and to oppress."-Michael J. Piellusch, Early American Literature Conquering Sickness is, in many ways, a classic borderlands study, as Goldberg highlights how indigenous people circumvented, undermined, coopted, and rerouted the impulses and programs of imperial and national powers. Goldberg's analysis, however, is sharpest-and most significant-when he explores the connections between identity formation, everyday life, and discourses of healthy living. . . . Conquering Sickness offers an excellent blueprint for locating subaltern cultural markers among the conquerors and colonizers of the borderlands."-Paul Barba, Southwestern Historical Quarterly "Conquering Sickness makes a significant contribution to our understanding of health and colonization in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands."-Heather Sinclair, Pacific Historical Review “A stunning achievement, Conquering Sickness tells a compelling multiethnic and transnational story about culture and power rooted in the everyday lives of people in Texas.”-John Mckiernan-Gonzalez, associate professor at Texas State University and author of  Fevered Measures: Public Health and Race at the Texas-Mexico Border, 1848–1952“As Mark Goldberg’s well-researched and detailed work moves from the first smallpox inoculations in the region and the widespread use of medicinal hot springs to cures for cholera and other diseases that utilized local plants such as peyote and maguey, he illuminates in new ways the cross-cultural encounters of this multiracial border region.”-Martha Few, author of For All of Humanity: Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala“I can imagine Conquering Sickness finding its way onto many reading lists. It’s clear that this is a book from which historians of the American West, Native American history, colonial and early national Mexico, and Texas now have much to learn.”-Thomas Andrews, author of Coyote Valley: Deep History in the High Rockies