The Laboring Dead: How Colonialism, Slavery and War Led to the Emergence of Epidemiology
4/7 MCHU Hall 301 & Zoom: bit.ly/3D6Xtfx
Abstract: This talk will explain how slave ships, plantations, and battlefields enabled physicians to observe how disease spreads. These settings highlighted stark power divisions and in so doing provided doctors with an unprecedented bird’s eye view to examine epidemic outbreaks. Subjugated populations were cramped into crowded, poorly ventilated locations where they were overworked and malnourished, which led to the outbreak of infectious disease. This prompted physicians to investigate how social conditions led to the outbreak of disease. While some doctors had considered the physical world as the cause of illness since the Middle Ages, if not earlier, the extreme, visually arresting conditions of seeing people crowded together led to a proliferation of military reports. The confluence of social settings—slave ships, plantations, battlefields, and colonized locations— throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—gave way to a proliferation of medical treatises, articles, and other studies that boosted the advancement of knowledge production about the spread of infectious disease.
Bio: Jim Downs is the author of Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine, which was published by Harvard University Press this past fall. He is also the author of Sick from Freedom: African American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction (Oxford UP, 2012) and Stand By Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation (Basic, 2016). He has edited six other academic books and is currently the Editor of Civil War History. He has published articles in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Slate, the Advocate, The Chronicle of Higher Education, among others. He earned his BA in English from the University of Pennsylvania, two MA degrees from Columbia University, where he also earned his PhD in History. In 2015, he was awarded an Andrew W. Mellon New Directions Fellowship that enabled him to go back to graduate school after tenure; he pursued training in medical anthropology at Harvard University, where he was also a fellow at the Weatherhead Initiative for Global History. He is currently the Gilder Lehrman-National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of History and Civil War Era Studies at Gettysburg College.
For more information, contact: Stephanie Lumbra at stephanie.lumbra@uconn.edu