Diseased Relations : University of New Mexico Press : 9780826348982 : 082634898X : 30 May 2011 : Throughout recorded history, epidemics have touched every aspect of life, including commerce, travel, agriculture, religious ritual, education, and political campaigns. In the tropical region of Yucatán, Mexico, which hosted a plethora of diseases, the violent resistance of various Mayan groups to state exploitation created one of the least understood but most significant threats to Mexican rule since the Conquest. As protection of one's own health--as well as control over individual and collective bodies--came to be ingrained in the imagined community that elites sought to construct, public health campaigns became symbols of modernization and an extension of the state's efforts to remake "clean" citizens out of what some perceived as the filthy, the disorderly, and the rebellious. Their medical plans and legislation, however, often ran counter to long-practiced rituals of burial, mourning,