Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire

Global Health Histories

by Suman Seth

Before the nineteenth century, travellers who left Britain for the Americas, West Africa, India and elsewhere encountered a medical conundrum: why did they fall ill when they arrived, and why - if they recovered - did they never become so ill again? The widely accepted answer was that the newcomers needed to become 'seasoned to the climate'. Suman Seth explores forms of eighteenth-century medical knowledge, including conceptions of seasoning, showing how geographical location was essential to this knowledge and helped to define relationships between Britain and her far-flung colonies. In this period, debates raged between medical practitioners over whether diseases changed in different climes. Different diseases were deemed characteristic of different races and genders, and medical practitioners were thus deeply involved in contestations over race and the legitimacy of the abolitionist cause. In this innovative and engaging history, Seth offers dramatically new ways to understand the mutual shaping of medicine, race, and empire.

Genres: History

Kindle Edition

Published June 14, 2018

Reviews

[Amanda Wells · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book starts with a bang (or a few), and only gets more deeply interesting from there.
I love this approach to understanding the development of medicine - carefully, thoroughly and reflexively seeking to understand 'how it was' in the context of the time. There were many instances of me geekily going "Oh wow!" as the ideas were built up and laid out for me.
And I'm really curious to read more in this field, and to see what Suman Seth writes in future... I'd love to read (or hear) his account of how 'we' switched from the 18thC version of difference and disease to the 19thC version, for instance.