Country of Poxes: Three Germs and the Taking of Territory

?This book is an important contribution to our understanding that disease is as political as it is biological. In a highly accessible way, Dr. Mukhopadhyay threads three of our most dreaded diseases into the story of Canada?s development as a settler-colonial state. A thoughtful study of fearsome infections and the human forces that shaped them, Country of Poxes is a great book and a valuable tool to make sense of our own troubled times.?

James Daschuk, author of Clearing the Plains

?Country of Poxes not only reveals how infections of the past have shaped our present, it causes us to rethink our understanding of disease, colonization, togetherness and care. Mukhopadhyay?s voice has the insight of a health worker woven with the beauty of a poet, tying the personal and historical into a riveting work.?

Christa Couture, author of How to Lose Everything

?In this remarkable book, Baijayanta Mukhopadhyay is at once historical and searingly contemporary, personal and visionary, and above all, sharply attuned to the ways in which colonialism continues to shape modern-day systems of health care in North America. It is an essential text that will fundamentally transform the way we understand and navigate our current age of pandemic as well as shine a light on how to collectively dismantle the systems of oppression that got us here.?

Julia Robinson, executive editor, PLOS Global Public Health

?A reflection for our times that demystifies medicine as a tool of power. We are in need of decolonizing western knowledge, and the humble critique in Country of Poxes points to opportunities to heal our world with solidarity.?

Erika Arteaga, activist for the right to health, co-coordinator of the People’s Health Movement Ecosystems and Health circle