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Baijayanta Mukhopadhyay is a Bengali settler living in Tio'tia: ke for over two decades. A family doctor who serves primarily in Eeyou Istchee, Baijayanta also works in Treaty 3 and 9 territories, as well as with undocumented migrants, unhoused people and queer/trans youth in the city. He is clinical faculty at the McGill Department of Family Medicine, focusing on supporting rural/low-resource practice. Mukhopadhyay also organises around issues related to extractivism, migrant rights, policing, public services and decolonizing global health within local and international networks and collectives. His previous works include A Labour of Liberation and essays in Briarpatch Magazine, Sarai Reader and Upping the Anti.
"""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 ""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 ""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 Baijayanta Mukhopadhyay's Country of Poxes: Three Germs and the Taking of Territory is a marvellous thought-provoking exploration of three diseases - syphilis, smallpox, and tuberculosis - intertwining with Canadian (and global to an extent) colonialism, dispossession, and desire of settlers to impose control.--Karl Hele ""Anishinabek News"" This book is a queasy gut-twisting but necessary read.--Prativa Baral ""Plos Blog"""
