New Books In Medicine

Suman Seth's new book Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2018)provides a new angle on the formation of modern ideas of race through the formation of the British Empire.  While scholars have often addressed this phenomenon through the lenses of academic anatomy and natural history, Seth suggests that medical care and theories of pathology were central to how Britons began to see their bodies as fundamentally distinct from other peoples.  After the Seven Years War, medical thinkers started contributing to British imperial ambitions by interpreting the distinct disease environments of the empire’s disparate parts.  Initially, a “seasoning sickness” was thought unavoidable as colonists entered a new clime, for the body’s complexion had to adapt to the qualities of the new environment.  Through numerous iterations and variations, this Hippocratic sense of a porous and variable body was abandoned as illness and vulnerabi