Downs, Jim (Author)
A sweeping global history that looks beyond European urban centers to show how slavery, colonialism, and war propelled the development of modern medicine.Most stories of medical progress come with ready-made heroes. John Snow traced the origins of London’s 1854 cholera outbreak to a water pump, leading to the birth of epidemiology. Florence Nightingale’s contributions to the care of soldiers in the Crimean War revolutionized medical hygiene, transforming hospitals from crucibles of infection to sanctuaries of recuperation. Yet histories of individual innovators ignore many key sources of medical knowledge, especially when it comes to the science of infectious disease.Reexamining the foundations of modern medicine, Jim Downs shows that the study of infectious disease depended crucially on the unrecognized contributions of nonconsenting subjects―conscripted soldiers, enslaved people, and subjects of empire. Plantations, slave ships, and battlefields were the laboratories in which physicians came to understand the spread of disease. Military doctors learned about the importance of air quality by monitoring Africans confined to the bottom of slave ships. Statisticians charted cholera outbreaks by surveilling Muslims in British-dominated territories returning from their annual pilgrimage. The field hospitals of the Crimean War and the US Civil War were carefully observed experiments in disease transmission.The scientific knowledge derived from discarding and exploiting human life is now the basis of our ability to protect humanity from epidemics. Boldly argued and eye-opening, Maladies of Empire gives a full account of the true price of medical progress.
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Kristin Hussey;
(2021)
Imperial Bodies in London: Empire, Mobility, and the Making of British Medicine, 1880–1914
(/isis/citation/CBB460048744/)
Book
Fischer-Tiné, Harald;
(2013)
Pidgin-Knowledge: Wissen und Kolonialismus
(/isis/citation/CBB001551249/)
Article
Mitchell, Michele;
Shibusawa, Naoko;
Miescher, Stephan F.;
(2014)
Introduction: Gender, Imperialism and Global Exchanges
(/isis/citation/CBB001550132/)
Book
Norman F. Cheville;
(2021)
Pioneer Science and the Great Plagues: How Microbes, War, and Public Health Shaped Animal Health
(/isis/citation/CBB450287019/)
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Bala, Poonam;
(2009)
Biomedicine as a Contested Site: Some Revelations in Imperial Contexts
(/isis/citation/CBB000950294/)
Book
Moran, Michelle Therese;
(2007)
Colonizing Leprosy: Imperialism and the Politics of Public Health in the United States
(/isis/citation/CBB000830138/)
Book
Yip, Ka-che;
(2009)
Disease, Colonialism, and the State: Malaria in Modern East Asian History
(/isis/citation/CBB001210662/)
Article
Valeska Huber;
(2020)
Pandemics and the politics of difference: rewriting the history of internationalism through nineteenth-century cholera
(/isis/citation/CBB161822106/)
Article
J'Nese Williams;
(2021)
Plantation Botany: Slavery and the Infrastructure of Government Science in the St. Vincent Botanic Garden, 1765–1820
(/isis/citation/CBB785011260/)
Book
Julie Collins;
(2020)
The Architecture and Landscape of Health: A Historical Perspective on Therapeutic Places 1790-1940
(/isis/citation/CBB663179204/)
Article
Lorcin, Patricia M. E.;
(1999)
Imperialism, Colonial Identity, and Race in Algeria, 1830-1876: The Role of the French Medical Corps
(/isis/citation/CBB000111788/)
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Mold, Alex;
Reubi, David;
(2013)
Assembling Health Rights in Global Context: Genealogies and Anthropologies
(/isis/citation/CBB001550959/)
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Abrams, Jeanne E.;
(2013)
Revolutionary Medicine: The Founding Fathers and Mothers in Sickness and in Health
(/isis/citation/CBB001420192/)
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Jensen, Niklas Thode;
(2012)
For the Health of the Enslaved: Slaves, Medicine and Power in the Danish West Indies, 1803--1848
(/isis/citation/CBB001251613/)
Thesis
Lord, Rebecca Ann;
(2002)
An “Imperative Obligation”: Public Health and the United States Military Occupation of the Dominican Republic, 1916--1924
(/isis/citation/CBB001562253/)
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Espinosa, Mariola;
(2009)
Epidemic Invasions: Yellow Fever and the Limits of Cuban Independence, 1878--1930
(/isis/citation/CBB001020061/)
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Amir A. Afkhami;
(2019)
A Modern Contagion: Imperialism and Public Health in Iran's Age of Cholera
(/isis/citation/CBB370933514/)
Thesis
Laura F. Goffman;
(2019)
Medical Frontiers: Health, Empire, and Society in the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula, 1862-1959
(/isis/citation/CBB632148734/)
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Sven Beckert;
(2014)
Empire of Cotton: A Global History
(/isis/citation/CBB590014542/)
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Beattie, James;
(2011)
Empire and Environmental Anxiety: Health, Science, Art, and Conservation in South Asia and Australasia, 1800--1920
(/isis/citation/CBB001320917/)
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