Title: Country of Poxes
Author: Baijayanta Mukhopadhyay
Publisher: Fernwood Publishing
Rating: 4/5
Genre: Education, Medicine, Indigenous Resistance and Decolonization
Review:

So Country of Poxes is a book that targets a very niche audience, and reading this book I was trying to figure out if I fit that audience. Country of Poxes is a very informational and educational book. It’s great if you want to read up about modern medicine, and the past, and I was learning a lot about the different diseases that were present and are still present today.

Some new things I learned were how the British and the French brought in diseases, and the indigenous were blamed for passing them. I thought this was really interesting, and an example of how things were back then. Indigenous used to be to blame for everything, and the British and the French continued to do pretty much whatever they wanted to.
There was a section on syphilis as well, and I actually learned what syphilis was for the first time, so that was good. I will say that the section on syphilis is very long and it was a lot of words. I had a hard time retaining all of it, and I feel like it could have been written better. Maybe like a textbook. With pictures! Pictures are good.

I will say that I expected this book to be a little bit more on Indigenous themes, especially since in the synopsis it really puts emphasis on how these diseases affected both colonial and Indigenous life, but I didn’t find as much of that as I expected? I genuinely questioned whether this book fit into my B2P (Bridge to Publishing) qualifications at times, due to the lack of mentions of Indgenous issues and history.

I liked how in-depth this book went, and one chapter was over 60 pages. Which is a VERY long chapter. I feel like it would have been better served as different parts with each chapter being a different section about that specific part. And I think that was a drawback while trying to read this book; information is presented in one solid slab. And there are no pictures. I think I would have benefitted from some illustrations covering the main points. And honestly, I have trouble identifying the main points in this book. I read it like a school textbook, but the problem was that it wasn’t quite like a school textbook, because at least with a textbook it’s points come across easily. The prose wasn’t bad, but from a casual reader’s perspective, I wasn’t able to absorb all of the information. I guess I would call this “too wordy” in a certain way.

I did like how this book looked at not only the past, but also the future. Predictions of what the world will be like from the perspective of someone who sees a lot of things and gets a lot of different perspectives in his daily life. I also like how this book is told from a perspective that I don’t have, which furthers my understanding of how others view the world. I think this also ties into the Indigenous ways of knowing, like two-eyed seeing, and although I may not have understood all of it, I can tell that this book challenges a lot of things.

I was very surprised to learn that infections are more common than you might think, the history of smallpox and other diseases like chickenpox, monkeypox, I about how certain diseases spread, and just how dangerous a lot of them are.

Honestly, I don’t have that much to say about this book, other than it’s really good if you want to learn more about medicine, and the history of medicine. I’m honestly not too sure what I thought of this book, but I give it 4 stars because I think it’s useful and it serves it purpose well. I don’t think I was the intended audience for it, but I tried to read it as best as I could, while also soaking up all of the information in it.

I do hope that you check it out, and I also hope that you could find it interesting a useful, but I don’t particularly think it’s for me.

Let’s get the official synopsis from Fernwood, shall we?

Country of Poxes is the story of land theft in North America through three diseases: syphilis, smallpox and tuberculosis. These infectious diseases reveal that medical care, widely considered a magnanimous cornerstone of the Canadian state, developed in lockstep with colonial control over Indigenous land and life.
Pathogens are storytellers of their time. The 500-year-old debate over the origins of syphilis reflects colonial judgments of morality and sexuality that became formally entwined in medicine. Smallpox is notoriously linked with the project of land theft, as colonizers destroyed Indigenous land, economies and life in the name of disease eradication. And tuberculosis, considered the “Indian disease,” aroused intense fear of contagion that launched separate systems of care for Indigenous Peoples in a de facto medical apartheid, while white settlers retreated to sanatoria in the Laurentians and Georgian Bay to be cured. In this immersive and deeply reflective book, physician and activist Dr. Baijayanta Mukhopadhyay provides riveting insights into the biological and social relationships of disease and empire. Country of Poxes considers a future of health in Canada that heeds redress and healing for Nations brutalized by the Canadian state.