Maladies Of Empire

Author : Jim Downs
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674971728
Total Pages : 273 pages
Book Rating : 4.21/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Maladies of Empire written by Jim Downs and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sweeping global history that looks beyond European urban centers to show how slavery, colonialism, and war propelled the development of modern medicine. Most stories of medical progress come with ready-made heroes. John Snow traced the origins of LondonÕs 1854 cholera outbreak to a water pump, leading to the birth of epidemiology. Florence NightingaleÕs contributions to the care of soldiers in the Crimean War revolutionized medical hygiene, transforming hospitals from crucibles of infection to sanctuaries of recuperation. Yet histories of individual innovators ignore many key sources of medical knowledge, especially when it comes to the science of infectious disease. Reexamining the foundations of modern medicine, Jim Downs shows that the study of infectious disease depended crucially on the unrecognized contributions of nonconsenting subjectsÑconscripted soldiers, enslaved people, and subjects of empire. Plantations, slave ships, and battlefields were the laboratories in which physicians came to understand the spread of disease. Military doctors learned about the importance of air quality by monitoring Africans confined to the bottom of slave ships. Statisticians charted cholera outbreaks by surveilling Muslims in British-dominated territories returning from their annual pilgrimage. The field hospitals of the Crimean War and the US Civil War were carefully observed experiments in disease transmission. The scientific knowledge derived from discarding and exploiting human life is now the basis of our ability to protect humanity from epidemics. Boldly argued and eye-opening, Maladies of Empire gives a full account of the true price of medical progress.

Author : Jim Downs
Publisher : Belknap Press
ISBN 13 : 9780674293861
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.6X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Maladies of Empire written by Jim Downs and published by Belknap Press. This book was released on 2023-10-10 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An eye-popping study of the history of infectious diseases, how they spread, and especially how they have been thwarted by experimentation on the bodies of soldiers, slaves, and colonial subjects...a timely, brilliant book about some of the brutal ironies in the story of medical progress."--David W. Blight, author of Frederick Douglass "Brilliant...Jim Downs uncovers the origins of epidemiology in slavery, colonialism, and war. A most original global history, this book is required reading for historians, medical researchers, and really anyone interested in the origins of modern medicine."--Sven Beckert, author of Empire of Cotton "A major contribution to the ongoing investigation of the impact of slavery and colonialism on the modern world. At a time when epidemiologists are rightly lauded...Downs calls on us not to forget the role of the long forgotten enslaved, colonized, and imprisoned in the development and dissemination of medical knowledge."--Eric Foner, author of The Second Founding "[Sheds] light on the violent foundations of disease control interventions and public health initiatives [and] implores us to address their inequities in the present."--Ragav Kishore, The Lancet Most stories of medical progress come with ready-made heroes. John Snow traced the origins of London's 1854 cholera outbreak to a water pump, leading to the birth of epidemiology. Florence Nightingale's care of soldiers in the Crimean War revolutionized medical hygiene. Yet focusing on individual innovators ignores many of the darker, unacknowledged sources of medical knowledge. Reexamining the foundations of modern medicine, Jim Downs shows that the study of infectious disease depended crucially on the unrecognized contributions of conscripted soldiers, enslaved people, and subjects of empire. From Africa and India to the Americas, plantations, slave ships, and battlefields were the laboratories where physicians came to understand the spread of disease. Boldly argued and urgently relevant, Maladies of Empire gives a long overdue account of the true price of medical progress.

Author : Siddhartha Mukherjee
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1439170916
Total Pages : 624 pages
Book Rating : 4.15/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Emperor of All Maladies written by Siddhartha Mukherjee and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-08-09 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a documentary from Ken Burns on PBS, this New York Times bestseller is “an extraordinary achievement” (The New Yorker)—a magnificent, profoundly humane “biography” of cancer—from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles in the twentieth century to cure, control, and conquer it to a radical new understanding of its essence. Physician, researcher, and award-winning science writer, Siddhartha Mukherjee examines cancer with a cellular biologist’s precision, a historian’s perspective, and a biographer’s passion. The result is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent chronicle of a disease humans have lived with—and perished from—for more than five thousand years. The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance, but also of hubris, paternalism, and misperception. Mukherjee recounts centuries of discoveries, setbacks, victories, and deaths, told through the eyes of his predecessors and peers, training their wits against an infinitely resourceful adversary that, just three decades ago, was thought to be easily vanquished in an all-out “war against cancer.” The book reads like a literary thriller with cancer as the protagonist. Riveting, urgent, and surprising, The Emperor of All Maladies provides a fascinating glimpse into the future of cancer treatments. It is an illuminating book that provides hope and clarity to those seeking to demystify cancer.

Author : Pratik Chakrabarti
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1137374802
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.06/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Medicine and Empire written by Pratik Chakrabarti and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2013-12-13 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of modern medicine is inseparable from the history of imperialism. Medicine and Empire provides an introduction to this shared history – spanning three centuries and covering British, French and Spanish imperial histories in Africa, Asia and America. Exploring the major developments in European medicine from the seventeenth century to the mid-twentieth century, Pratik Chakrabarti shows that the major developments in European medicine had a colonial counterpart and were closely intertwined with European activities overseas: - The increasing influence of natural history on medicine - The growth of European drug markets - The rise of surgeons in status - Ideas of race and racism - Advancements in sanitation and public health - The expansion of the modern quarantine system - The emergence of Germ theory and global vaccination campaigns Drawing on recent scholarship and primary texts, this book narrates a mutually constitutive history in which medicine was both a 'tool' and a product of imperialism, and provides an original, accessible insight into the deep historical roots of the problems that plague global health today.

Author : Jim Downs
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199908788
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.83/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Sick from Freedom written by Jim Downs and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-05-01 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bondspeople who fled from slavery during and after the Civil War did not expect that their flight toward freedom would lead to sickness, disease, suffering, and death. But the war produced the largest biological crisis of the nineteenth century, and as historian Jim Downs reveals in this groundbreaking volume, it had deadly consequences for hundreds of thousands of freed people. In Sick from Freedom, Downs recovers the untold story of one of the bitterest ironies in American history--that the emancipation of the slaves, seen as one of the great turning points in U.S. history, had devastating consequences for innumerable freed people. Drawing on massive new research into the records of the Medical Division of the Freedmen's Bureau-a nascent national health system that cared for more than one million freed slaves-he shows how the collapse of the plantation economy released a plague of lethal diseases. With emancipation, African Americans seized the chance to move, migrating as never before. But in their journey to freedom, they also encountered yellow fever, smallpox, cholera, dysentery, malnutrition, and exposure. To address this crisis, the Medical Division hired more than 120 physicians, establishing some forty underfinanced and understaffed hospitals scattered throughout the South, largely in response to medical emergencies. Downs shows that the goal of the Medical Division was to promote a healthy workforce, an aim which often excluded a wide range of freedpeople, including women, the elderly, the physically disabled, and children. Downs concludes by tracing how the Reconstruction policy was then implemented in the American West, where it was disastrously applied to Native Americans. The widespread medical calamity sparked by emancipation is an overlooked episode of the Civil War and its aftermath, poignantly revealed in Sick from Freedom.

Author : Priya Satia
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0735221871
Total Pages : 655 pages
Book Rating : 4.71/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Empire of Guns written by Priya Satia and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-04-10 with total page 655 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2018 BY THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE AND SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE By a prize-winning young historian, an authoritative work that reframes the Industrial Revolution, the expansion of British empire, and emergence of industrial capitalism by presenting them as inextricable from the gun trade "A fascinating and important glimpse into how violence fueled the industrial revolution, Priya Satia's book stuns with deep scholarship and sparkling prose."--Siddhartha Mukherjee, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies We have long understood the Industrial Revolution as a triumphant story of innovation and technology. Empire of Guns, a rich and ambitious new book by award-winning historian Priya Satia, upends this conventional wisdom by placing war and Britain's prosperous gun trade at the heart of the Industrial Revolution and the state's imperial expansion. Satia brings to life this bustling industrial society with the story of a scandal: Samuel Galton of Birmingham, one of Britain's most prominent gunmakers, has been condemned by his fellow Quakers, who argue that his profession violates the society's pacifist principles. In his fervent self-defense, Galton argues that the state's heavy reliance on industry for all of its war needs means that every member of the British industrial economy is implicated in Britain's near-constant state of war. Empire of Guns uses the story of Galton and the gun trade, from Birmingham to the outermost edges of the British empire, to illuminate the nation's emergence as a global superpower, the roots of the state's role in economic development, and the origins of our era's debates about gun control and the "military-industrial complex" -- that thorny partnership of government, the economy, and the military. Through Satia's eyes, we acquire a radically new understanding of this critical historical moment and all that followed from it. Sweeping in its scope and entirely original in its approach, Empire of Guns is a masterful new work of history -- a rigorous historical argument with a human story at its heart.

Author : James H. Mills
Publisher : OUP Oxford
ISBN 13 : 9780191554650
Total Pages : 268 pages
Book Rating : 4.50/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Cannabis Britannica written by James H. Mills and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2003-09-11 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cannabis Britannica explores the historical origins of the UK's legislation and regulations on cannabis preparations before 1928. It draws on published and unpublished sources from the seventeenth century onwards, from archives in the UK and India, to show how the history of cannabis and the British before the twentieth century was bound up with imperialism. James Mills argues that until the 1900s, most of the information and experience gathered by British sources were drawn from colonial contexts as imperial administrators governed and observed populations where use of cannabis was extensive and established. This is most obvious in the 1890s when British anti-opium campaigners in the House of Commons seized on the issue of Government of India excise duties on the cannabis trade in Asia in order to open up another front in their attacks on imperial administration. The result was that cannabis preparations became a matter of concern in Parliament which accordingly established the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission. The story in the twentieth century is of the momentum behind moves to include cannabis substances in domestic law and in international treaties. The latter was a matter of the diplomatic politics of imperialism, as Britain sought to defend its cannabis revenues in India against American and Egyptian interests. The domestic story focuses on the coming together of the police, the media, and the pharmaceutical industry to form misunderstandings of cannabis that forced it onto the Poisons Schedule despite the misgivings of the Home Office and of key medical professionals. The book is the first full history of the origins of the moments when cannabis first became subjected to laws and regulations in Britain.

Author : J. Buckingham
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 1403932735
Total Pages : 247 pages
Book Rating : 4.30/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Leprosy in Colonial South India written by J. Buckingham and published by Springer. This book was released on 2001-12-18 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leprosy is a neglected topic in the burgeoning field of the history of medicine and the colonized body. Leprosy in Colonial South India is not only a history of an intriguing and dramatic endemic disease, it is a history of colonial power in nineteenth-century British India as seen through the lens of British medical and legal encounters with leprosy and its sufferers in south India. Leprosy in Colonial South India offers a detailed examination of the contribution of leprosy treatment and legislative measures to negotiated relationships between indigenous and British medicine and the colonial impact on indigenous class formation, while asserting the agency of the poor and vagrant leprous classes in their own history.

Author : Hugh Cagle
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107196639
Total Pages : 385 pages
Book Rating : 4.36/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Assembling the Tropics written by Hugh Cagle and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-06 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book charts the convergence of science, culture, and politics across Portugal's empire, showing how a global geographical concept was born. In accessible, narrative prose, this book explores the unexpected forms that science took in the early modern world. It highlights little-known linkages between Asia and the Atlantic world.

Author : David W. Blight
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
ISBN 13 : 0820351474
Total Pages : 208 pages
Book Rating : 4.76/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Beyond Freedom written by David W. Blight and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2017-11-01 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of eleven original essays interrogates the concept of freedom and recenters our understanding of the process of emancipation. Who defined freedom, and what did freedom mean to nineteenth-century African Americans, both during and after slavery? Did freedom just mean the absence of constraint and a widening of personal choice, or did it extend to the ballot box, to education, to equality of opportunity? In examining such questions, rather than defining every aspect of postemancipation life as a new form of freedom, these essays develop the work of scholars who are looking at how belonging to an empowered government or community defines the outcome of emancipation. Some essays in this collection disrupt the traditional story and time-frame of emancipation. Others offer trenchant renderings of emancipation, with new interpretations of the language and politics of democracy. Still others sidestep academic conventions to speak personally about the politics of emancipation historiography, reconsidering how historians have used source material for understanding subjects such as violence and the suffering of refugee women and children. Together the essays show that the question of freedom—its contested meanings, its social relations, and its beneficiaries—remains central to understanding the complex historical process known as emancipation. Contributors: Justin Behrend, Gregory P. Downs, Jim Downs, Carole Emberton, Eric Foner, Thavolia Glymph, Chandra Manning, Kate Masur, Richard Newman, James Oakes, Susan O’Donovan, Hannah Rosen, Brenda E. Stevenson.