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haleybre's review
informative
slow-paced
2.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Confinement, Medical trauma, Death, Trafficking, Medical content, Racism, Slavery, War, Forced institutionalization, Suicide, and Colonisation
jordanb20's review against another edition
medium-paced
1.5
Some genuinely interesting points, but sandwiched between the same repetitive paragraphs. Each chapter reminds you of the thesis statement at least 3 times. But if you remove the repetition (~50% of the pages) then it’s informative.
akswaneee's review
dark
informative
medium-paced
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: War, Slavery, and Death
cornsyrup's review against another edition
Interesting and well-researched but very dry, would be of great interest to a history student!
kerrygibbons's review against another edition
3.0
This book was a bit dry to be honest. The content was interesting but very much I would not recommend this book to many people. It contains graphic, if clinical, descriptions of disease, forced vaccination harvesting of children, and quotes and other depictions of people as belongings/statistics/etc.
It was honestly a bit surprising to learn upon a bit of googling that the author is white.
It was honestly a bit surprising to learn upon a bit of googling that the author is white.
gannent's review against another edition
slow-paced
2.5
This book felt confused. From the subtitle it’s about medicine, but in reading it turns out to actually be about the history of epidemiology. There’s a constant tension between the stated project of trying to center the patients who are the subjects of research and centering the doctors who did the research. Certainly they aren’t valorized as they might have been in the past, but they still seem to take up most of the narrative. There are just elementary mistakes that I can’t believe slipped through editing, like a claim that equality was a goal of white anti slavery activists, which is just completely incorrect.
The topic is important, and he does show how people using what we today would see as epidemiological methods used colonialism, slavery, and war to develop those methods. But he doesn’t show how these case studies influenced the future history of epidemiology. I didn’t learn from this book how or if these case studies developed methods that laid the groundwork for future epidemiology.
I didn’t feel that the thesis of this book was well-defined from the beginning; it only seemed to become clearer over the course of the book. And I didn’t feel that the examples strongly and clearly supported the thesis. Maybe could have used better organization and editing to make it more coherent of an argument. I don’t doubt the premise that racism and colonization are deep in the history of medicine and epidemiology, but I just don’t think this particular book was successfully executed.
The topic is important, and he does show how people using what we today would see as epidemiological methods used colonialism, slavery, and war to develop those methods. But he doesn’t show how these case studies influenced the future history of epidemiology. I didn’t learn from this book how or if these case studies developed methods that laid the groundwork for future epidemiology.
I didn’t feel that the thesis of this book was well-defined from the beginning; it only seemed to become clearer over the course of the book. And I didn’t feel that the examples strongly and clearly supported the thesis. Maybe could have used better organization and editing to make it more coherent of an argument. I don’t doubt the premise that racism and colonization are deep in the history of medicine and epidemiology, but I just don’t think this particular book was successfully executed.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Racism, Medical content, and Pandemic/Epidemic
Moderate: Death, Medical trauma, War, Xenophobia, Terminal illness, Trafficking, Colonisation, Slavery, and Confinement
Minor: Excrement and Vomit