Mortality and Measurement: Race-Medicine, Statistics, and Empire

Event details Date: Thursday, October 22, 2026 Time: 4:00 PM to 5:30 PM Location: Classroom Building, Room 229, Boyd Seminar Room Type: Lecture / Workshop About this event Suman Seth is the Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow and Marie Underhill Noll Professor of the History of Science at Cornell University. This talk will offer an overview of Seth's forthcoming book from Cambridge University Press (2027), which seeks to make four interlocking arguments: First, that it was in medicine, rather than science, that we see the 'main game' for the development of naturalistic understandings of race in the nineteenth century; second, that a key locus for this development was to be found in medical statistics: the roots for much of our thinking about scientific uses of race today lie in the racialized statistics of the era of high imperialism; third, that the history of race must be written in an imperial and not merely a national register, a point that also requires us to see the history of slavery and its abolition as having effects well beyond the areas of its immediate application; and fourth, that the medicine of empire 'struck back' after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, so that understandings of diseases that would never reach British shores nonetheless shaped even the most parochial of metropolitan medicine. Official event details: https://calendar.duke.edu/show?fq=id%3ACAL-8a002cbd-9fb2e569-01a0-b61264dc-00000d5ddemobedework%40mysite.edu