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Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine by Downs, Jim is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.

What is Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine about?

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

Who reads Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine?

Author

Downs, Jim

Publisher

Harvard University, Department of Sanskrit & Indian Studies

Published

2021

Language

EN

ISBN

9780674249882

Category

nonfiction

Subjects

Medical, Medicine

Rating

4.3 / 5 (65 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-14