tons of, you know, dozens actually of British physicians deployed throughout the empire who,

when they come back, they're like, we know stuff.

And they create the London Epidemiological Society in 1850.

And their knowledge, their ideas, their methods, their information resulted from colonial expeditions. additions. Welcome to the Death Panel. To support the show and get access to all of our weekly bonus episodes, become a patron at patreon.com

slash death panel pod. And if you'd like to help us out a little bit more, share the show

with your friends, post about your favorite episodes, pre-order health communism, and request it

at your local library, and follow us at Death Panel underscore. So today we are joined by author Jim Downs,

Professor of Civil War Era Studies and History at Gettysburg College,

who is here to talk about his latest book called Maladies of Empire,

How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine.

Jim, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm so thrilled to

have you on the show. Thank you so much for having me. And we are also joined by deaf panel

contributor Abby Cardis, who is a perinatal epidemiologist currently working in harm reduction.

So first, Abby and Jim and I are going to talk about his book. And then after

that, Abby and I are going to take a second to talk about the current contextual implications of

Jim's work and sort of the lessons that we took away from it. Abby, welcome back to the death panel.

Thanks for having me back. So I have asked Abby here to join me

in speaking with you, Jim, because your book, Maladies of Empire, is really about sort of the early

development of methods of what we now call epidemiology, which are methods to study health

at a population level. And you argue this was facilitated by

the bureaucracy of imperialism, allowing doctors to closely study many non-consenting subjects

like conscripted soldiers, enslaved and colonized people, Muslim migrants, and other subaltern subjects of empire.

...