Tropical Disease & Medicine with Suman Seth
Episode 92 - May 13, 2022
Suman Seth joins Merle and Lee to talk about his work on medicine in the British colonies during the 18th century and how it changed as people learned about tropical diseases. Suman begins by providing background on how medicine was practiced in Britain and in the colonies, alongside how new generations learned about tropical diseases over time. He then discusses how people new to colonies were “seasoned” to acclimate them to tropical diseases along with differences in this impact on colonizers, soldiers, and the enslaved among others. At the end, Suman describes how these changes shaped the development of ideas of race and racial thinking
Further Reading
- Harrison, Mark. Medicine in an Age of Commerce and Empire: Britain and Its Tropical Colonies, 1660-1830. Oxford: University Press, 2010.
- Hogarth, Rana Asali. Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840. University of North Carolina Press, 2017.
- Lockley, Tim. Military Medicine and the Making of Race: Life and Death in the West India Regiments, 1795-1874. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
- Schiebinger, Londa. Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World. Stanford: University Press, 2017.
- Seth, Suman. “Race, Specificity, and Statistics in Victorian Medicine.” Journal of Victorian Culture 15 (2022): 1–14.
Our Guest
Suman Seth
Marie Underhill Noll Professor of the History of Science – Cornell University
