Archiving Medical Violence: Consent and the Carceral State

Christopher Perreira's Archiving Medical Violence: Consent and the Carceral State interrogates the national and scientific progress within the production of the empire of the United States by examining the archival documentation of racialized forms of medical violence. Medical imagery weaves a narration of value of oneself through racialized criminality that produces contemporary citizenship, identity, and collective memory.Perreira's main argument focuses on race narratives that reexamine the anti-racism of medicine and the broader context of medical violence. This is done through the examination of archives and museums whose institutions uphold the collective memory of colonialism and anti-racism in the early nineteenth century, leading into the development of public health in the twentieth century. His methodology includes browsing archival documentation with a critical lens to “read between the lines” and analyze what is left unsaid in the social and political framed records. According to Perreira, the establishment of archival institutions and the material they contain upholds cultural productions that need to be disseminated of their discourse. In addition, he contends medicine as a practice has devised criminality and incarceration, and it has devalued the bodies of criminals. As a result, people have become nonconsenting persons in the progression of medical sciences.Since the 1990s, it has become more apparent that historians include history of medicine as an interdisciplinary and crucial framework for ethnic studies. An associate professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, Perreira aims to bring awareness to his readers that the racialization and carceral status of individuals further demonstrate violence in medicine. Perreira includes the COVID-19 pandemic in the preface and acknowledgements which caused an emergence and a new dynamic of medical care and violence that brought forth questions of who receives care and how do doctors decide? How does the management or mismanagement of government affect the overall death toll? The inclusion of COVID-19 demonstrates that Perreira and the readers have a shared collective lived experience with the pandemic—a recent, current event. Navigating medical violence within the pandemic has caused him to repeatedly try to understand the event even when he applies his methodologies. He states that racial logic and limitations in language to name a phenomenon like COVID-19 still hinder his own navigation as the large-scale effects are still collectively being learned.If anything, Perreira provides crucial information regarding the complex and dynamic histories of medicine that are often difficult to disseminate. He lays the groundwork to explain how the empire of the United States shifted from the violence of a colonized nineteenth century toward an institutionalization of public health. Then, the United States slowly transitioned to adopt the rhetoric of anti-racism post–Civil Rights Movement in the twenty first century.Not only does the way collective memory view medicine shift, but the collection practices of repositories alter over time. The individual who creates materials determines the importance of the records, which can then be later appraised for donation or purchase at an archive. Then these materials become processed, potentially by an individual who has no expertise in the same field as the creator of the documentation. National standards for archival practices influence the ways materials are often described and displayed in archival software systems with an added level of unique standards created by the archival repository. Researchers then perform online searches or visit the repository to personally interpret the records. As stated above, Perreira has chosen a methodology that causes him to research and interpret what is present and what is not present in the documentation and how that ultimately leads to the understanding of the complex nature of medical violence. However, the critical lens that Perreira claims to utilize is not necessarily described for readers to attempt to recreate. Therefore, readers are left to their own devices to determine critical analysis and can infer from Perreira's own conclusions of archiving medical violence. His unstated objective may be for the reader to perform their own critical analysis to decipher other perspectives through the interpretation of archival documentation.