Suman Seth, "Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

New Books in American Studies · May 13, 2022 · 1h 2m

Before the nineteenth century, travelers who left Britain for the Americas, West Africa, India and elsewhere encountered a medical conundrum: why did they fall ill when they arrived, and why - if they recovered - did they never become so ill again? The widely accepted answer was that the newcomers needed to become 'seasoned to the climate'. In his book Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge UP, 2020), Suman Seth explores forms of eighteenth-century medical knowledge, including conceptions of seasoning, showing how geographical location was…