"Makes Visible Things That Need to Be Seen"

"The grisly record-keeping of the trade in enslaved people and colonial governments provided the infrastructure for epidemiological data collection. Downs shows how logs of sickness and death on slave ships, in prisons and at quarantine stations—unmentioned in standard histories—were central to the emergence of public health. A bureaucracy 'established in the service of war, colonialism, and imperialism emerged as the foundation for the development of epidemiology'. Downs provides history as truth-telling."

At Nature, Mary T. Bassett reviews Jim Downs's Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine.