Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery & War Transformed Medicine

Jim Downs is the Gilder Lehrman-National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Civil War Era Studies and History at Gettysburg College. He is the author of Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine (Harvard UP, 2021), which will be translated into Chinese, French, Japanese, Korean, and Russian. His other books include Sick from Freedom: African American Sickness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction (Oxford UP, 2012) and Stand By Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation (Basic Books, 2016). He has published essays in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Vice, Slate, The Lancet, LA Times, among others. He is also the editor of Civil War History. He is also a partner at History Studio.  In 2023, he was elected to both the Society for American Historians in the US and the Royal Historical Society in the UK.

Downs' talk rethinks the history of epidemiology by uncovering the untold ways in which slavery, imperialism, and war created built environments—ships, plantations, and battlefields—that enabled physicians to study the spread of infectious disease. Drawing on archival records in England, Malta, Spain, and the United States (as well as in in Czech Republic and Hungary), he has uncovered evidence of how doctors developed epidemiological methods before John Snow’s infamous investigation, which traced the outbreak of cholera to a water pump.  While medical thinkers since Aristotle have studied epidemics, this lecture will show how the confluence of slavery, imperialism, and war gave way to the creation of a massive bureaucracy that enabled doctors to develop a bird’s eye view of an epidemic. These unprecedented networks allowed physicians to share information about infectious disease among subjugated populations, which led to the first ever Epidemiological Society in 1850.

While Downs' research charts how physicians created new theories, it also highlights the stories of patients and subjugated populations who produced new forms of medical knowledge. He will, for example, explain how the transatlantic slave trade enabled doctors to prove the existence of oxygen. Prof. Downs will also provide disturbing evidence of how Confederate doctors harvested vaccine matter by using the bodies of enslaved infants and children.

Professor Downs will be delivering this talk as part of the History Department Colloquium Lecture Series.  For information on our upcoming talks, visit https://history.wustl.edu/events.

A Q&A session will follow.  Light refreshments will be served.