2022 Ross Horning Lecture

Mike and Josie Harper Center, Hixson-Lied Auditorium,Omaha NE 68178

25 October, 2022

Description

Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery and War Transformed Medicine retells the origins of epidemiology by examining how military and colonial doctors developed new understandings of disease transmission by examining the outbreak of infectious disease on slave ships, colonial lands, and battlefields. Drawing on records from the British National Archives, the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine and Civil War archives from across the United States, this talk will uncover how the field of epidemiology began as a global practice.  By closely examining medical treatises, this lecture will highlight the connections between the understanding of oxygen as a chemical element and the international slave trade as well as how epidemiological practices, which are guiding us through Covid, data collection, contact tracing, and mapping originated as a direct result of imperialism, slavery and war.  Jim Downs is currently the Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow at the Hutchins Center at Harvard University as well as the Gilder Lehrman-National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of History and Civil War Studies at Gettysburg College. He is the Editor of Civil War History.