Unequal Cures illuminates the connections between public health and political change in Bolivia from the beginning of the twentieth century, when the country was a political oligarchy, until the eve of the 1952 national revolution that ushered in universal suffrage, agrarian reform, and the nationalization of Bolivia’s tin mines. Ann Zulawski examines both how the major ideological and social transformations that took place during these years changed thinking about medicine and how ideas of public health figured in debates about what kind of country Bolivia should become. Zulawski argues that the populist politics that emerged in the 1930s and 1940s helped to consolidate Bolivia’s medical profession and that improved public health was essential to the creation of a modern state. Yet she finds that at mid-century women, indigenous Bolivians, and the poor were still considered inferior to other citizens. They received different medical treatments and levels of care as a result. Drawing on hospital and cemetery records, censuses, doctors’ assessments of patients’ conditions, newspaper accounts, and interviews, Zulawski describes the major medical problems that Bolivia faced during the first half of the twentieth century, their social and economic causes, and what was done to ameliorate them. Her analysis encompasses the Rockefeller Foundation’s campaign against yellow fever, the almost total collapse of Bolivia’s health care system during the disastrous Chaco War with Paraguay (1932–35), an assessment of women’s health in light of the social and economic realities of their lives, and a look at Manicomio Pacheco, the national mental hospital. An important social and intellectual history, Unequal Cures reveals the vital interplay between medicine and state formation in Bolivia.