Discover how military medicine and medical writing helped shape understandings of race in nineteenth-century Britain—and how those ideas traveled far beyond the battlefield. In Military Medicine and the Making of Race, Tim Lockley traces how the West India Regiments’ extensive records and evolving medical arguments influenced the portrayal of Black soldiers across the Atlantic World.
Key benefits
- Understand how Britain’s Black soldiers contributed to changing attitudes toward race throughout the nineteenth century.
- Explore why the West India Regiments were “the best-documented group of black men in the Atlantic World,” supported by records covering 100,000+ recruits over 132 years.
- Learn how late eighteenth-century surgeons used medical literature to frame white and Black bodies as radically different, including the notion of the “superhuman” Black soldier.
- See how, by the late 1830s, military statisticians challenged these claims by emphasizing vulnerabilities.
- Follow how medical and military publications spread beyond British medical and military circles, with international impact—especially in the US—reflecting and reinforcing changing notions of Blackness.
Who this is for
- Students and readers interested in military history, the history of medicine, and the history of race.
- Researchers looking for evidence-rich discussion of how medical literature and military recordkeeping intersected.
- Anyone who wants to understand how scientific and statistical arguments helped construct racial ideas across the nineteenth century and beyond.
Details
- ISBN: 9781108495622, 1108495621
- Edition: 1
- Authors: Tim Lockley; Timothy James Lockley
- Publisher: Cambridge University Press
- Published Date: 2020-04-02
- Pages: 220
Take the next step in your reading: add Military Medicine and the Making of Race to your library today and explore how medicine, military records, and international publications helped make race.
