“Caring for Their Prisoner Compatriots”: Health and Dental Hygiene at the Kooskia Internment Camp

Introduction: Health and Medicine in Historical Social Contexts

“…When addressed, health and disease are often viewed through a biological lens that draws from analysis of skeletal remains. Only a few previous archaeological articles have analyzed medical material culture (Wilkie 2003 ; Hosken and Tiede 2018 ). Further, archaeologists have only recently begun to incorporate theoretical insights from medical anthropology.…”

Imagining Archaeologies without Ableism

“…Archaeology, as detailed by a number of these authors, has a rich history of looking at the materialization of health care practices and systems through a range of theoretical frames, be in consumerism (e.g., Larsen 1994 ); understanding disparities in access to health care (Hosken and Tiede 2018 ; Psota 2011 ; Rathbun 1987 ); continuities in particular ethnomedical traditions (e.g., Fennell 2010 ; Linn 2010 ; Lun 2015 ; Wilkie 1996a , 2000 ), the politicization of reproductive health (e.g., Barnes 2021 ; Carnevale et al 2016 ; Kozub 2018 ; Wilkie 2003 , 2013 ); community approaches to health care (e.g., Fisher et al 2007 ; Geismar and Janowitz 1993 ; McCarthy and Ward 2000 ); or the politics of institutionalization (e.g., Beisaw and Gibb 2009 ). Within this wide range of approaches to understanding healthcare have emerged issues of race, class, sex and gender, yet seldom has disability theorizing entered into archaeological discourse—with bioarchaeology only recently thinking about impairment and disability rather than paleopathology (see Byrnes and Muller 2017 ; but especially Kincopf 2020 ) and archaeological works discussing disability not necessarily engaging with disability theory (e.g., Psota 2011 ; Spence et al 2014 ; cf.…”