Empire and the Development of Medicine with Jim Downs
Episode 97 - August 21, 2022
Jim Downs (Gettysburg College) joins the Infectious Historians to talk about his recent book. The conversation begins with epidemiology and its origins, focusing on the 18th century military bureaucracy and the production of scientific knowledge in venues associated with slavery, prisons, the colonies and war. Jim follows the people who produced this knowledge – but emphasizes the voices of the marginalized groups who are an inherent part of this story. The last part of the interview is a discussion of Jim’s public-facing work and some of the issues that such work might encounter.
Further Reading
- Jim Downs, "Asking Gay Men to be Careful Isn't Homophobia," The Atlantic, August 13, 2022.
- Downs, Jim. Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine, Belknap Press: 2021.
- Jim Downs, "The Pandemic Isn't Over," The Atlantic, June 9, 2021.
- Jacob Steere-Williams, The Filth Disease : Typhoid Fever and the Practices of Epidemiology in Victorian England (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2020).
- Rana A. Hogarth, Medicalizing Blackness : Making Racial Differences in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017).
Our Guest
Jim Downs
Gilder Lehrman NEH Chair of Civil War Era Studies and History
