Jim Downs, "Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine" (Harvard UP, 2023)

Jim Downs’ most recent book is Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine. Professor Downs is the Gilder Lehrman-National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Civil War Era Studies and History at Gettysburg College. The book offers a new history of epidemiology by shifting focus to the people behind the data points—people who were enslaved, imprisoned, or in some circles overlooked by conventional histories of epidemiology. The book shifts across locations and empires from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century because it wants to show how the confluence of war, imperialism, and slavery really made modern epidemiology. This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and students at Vanderbilt University in the course, “American Medicine & the World.” Please email Laura with any feedback on the interview or questions about how to design collaborative interview projects for the classroom. Read Laura's article, "Can New Media Save the Book?" email: laura.stark@vanderbilt.edu Jim Downs is the Gilder Lehrman-National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Civil War Era Studies and History at Gettysburg College. Laura Stark is Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Medicine, Health, and Society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member!

You can listen to Jim Downs, "Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine" (Harvard UP, 2023) online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Jim Downs, "Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine" (Harvard UP, 2023) is an episode from New Books in Medicine by New Books Network.

This episode is 51:36 long.

This episode was published on Apr 21, 2026.

Yes. Use the heart button on the episode page to add it to your favorite episodes list.

Yes. This page shows related episodes from New Books in Medicine when more episodes are available from the podcast feed.