David Werner (2021): The idea of the Newsletters came up when I was just beginning the Mexico projects and wanted to raise money to get supplies and to spend a year there, which was as long as I intend to spend. And to raise money for it I did a couple of things.
One was to do a whole batch of my paintings of birds and plants and so on, and have a sale of them at Peninsula School, where we had parents of students I was teaching before and I was really close to their families. A lot of people bought paintings—whether they really liked them or not I don’t know. But they were supportive of the project.
The other thing was to sell subscriptions for the so-called Reports from the Sierra Madre. I agreed in a year to spend a year and to put out four Reports and to provide them to the subscribers. And so that’s how the idea of the Reports initiated. Polly Polinger would retype them and then give them over to Bob Wallace who had a mimeograph machine, and he would mimeograph them and send them out. They were virtually unillustrated. They had an occasional picture here and there.
And then that same process of Polly with Bob Wallace continued when we started the Newsletters. It was around 1970 I think. Originally done on mimeo, then we went onto printing them out, we got the printer and so on, and eventually they were reaching I think 121 countries or something. We had quite a circulation. And a good deal of feedback, and were quite popular.
But eventually the price of sending them out—we asked people to subscribe and to pay something or to donate something. Most of the Newsletters were going to backwoods programs in poor countries and we just wanted to be sure that the people got the information. But we could no longer … the prices went up and up and up on postage primarily. We decided we would convert them to online. The earlier ones were never online.
 
1953: Fresh out of highschool, David Werner made a six-month-long biological expedition to the wilderness areas of western Mexico, including time in the small town of Las Varas helping Dr. Ricardo Sánchez.
1965: David revisits Mexico, travelling throughout the Sierra Madre, making his own connections and planting the seeds of his health projects in the village of Ajoya de San Jerónim. Project Piaxtla begins.
1966: Before the Newsletters, David Werner issued four inspiring Reports from the Sierra Madre: “This is the backstory, the real-time day-to-day journals and reports of what David experienced in the backcountry of Western Mexico, living and working side-by-side with the campesinos.” The original reports were typed up by Polly Polinger and mimeographed by Bob Wallace. In 2019, they were compiled into a richly illustrated book. From the first Report:
It had been my original intention to remain in the village of Ajoya only long enough to arrange for a burro train to transport the medicines to the high country of the Sierra. But Nature has had her surprises waiting for me, and my friends back in Palo Alto have had theirs. The result has been that now, some eight weeks later, I am at last getting my small cavalcade in motion. But perhaps it is better this way, not only have I come to know and love the Pueblo of Ajoya, but by now each little village and rancho along the way has extended its invitation to me, and has offered to transport my cargo to the next. Already many villagers have come for medicines from as far away as Jocuixtita, Verano, and Caballo de Arriba. Wherever I go I know I will be welcome.
Read all the Reports from the Sierra Madre: One, Two, Three, and Four.
1967: The first Newsletter of the Sierra Madre was released. Like the Reports, the early Newsletters were typed up by Poly Polinger, printed on mimeograph by Bob Wallace, and mailed to a small circle of supporters.
The series of journals titled “Reports from the Sierra Madre” terminated with No. 4. However, many subscribers have shown so much interest in my continuing Mexican Project that I would like to keep them informed, if briefly, of my activities in the barrancas since the last Report came out in February.
1982: The era of the mimeograph ends, as the Newsletters are designed and printed on computers. [Editor: Check this fact.]
1988: Issue 19 was the first Newsletter on global health issues, describing the situation in South Africa during Apartheid.
This shift from local to more global concerns reflects our growing awareness of how small the Earth, as a sociopolitical unit, has become. You will recall that in our last newsletter (No. 18) we looked at how the wellbeing of a village family in the Sierra Madre is affected by growing of narcotics. We noted how this, in turn, is linked to international drug traffic, to the huge foreign debt of poor countries, and to the unjust world economic order.
1994: HealthWrights makes its first appearance on the masthead of the Newsletters.
1995: There is some uncertainty about when the first HealthWrights website went up. Jason Weston insists he built the first website in 1995, but the existing evidence from the Wayback Machine indicates the first HW website was built in 1997. Regardless, from around this time, HealthWrights has a constant web presence, and gradually the Newsletters and other documentation were placed online. For the Newsletters, this resulted in a mix of HTML, simple PDF, multi-column PDF (for print) and other variations.
2000: Project Piaxtla falls off the masthead as the project is no longer viable in Ajoya due to increasing drug-related violence and social instability.
2000: The Newsletters are available online by request, but continue to be designed for print with multi-column PDFs.
2002: The HealthWrights team begins translating English Newsletters into Mexicanized Spanish. This effort is led by Juan Ignacio Gómez Iruretagoyena, with revisions by Dolores Mesina and Adrián Martínez Lomovskoi. [Editor: Check this fact.]
2007: The Newsletters shifts online, with a few printed copies for those who require it.
2015: The Newsletters goes web-only, and are longer published in multi-column PDF format. The contents are also streamlined, tending to focus on single issues and experiences.
2018-2020: HealthWrights begins adapting the Newsletters to a mobile-friendly format for our globably inter-connected age. The first attempt was on (healthwrights.wordpress.com). However, it was discovered that the Newsletters were too complex to be handled by Wordpress’s ‘Gutenberg’ block editor, which was optimized for simple blogs. This work was abandoned.
2020-Present: It was decided to try to redesign the site using an entirely new web framework, Hugo. This is the site you see today.
 
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