Winner of the 2022 Whitfield Prize
A postcolonial history of medicine in London
Imperial Bodies in London (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021) is a postcolonial history of British medicine, focused on the imperial city of London at the height of the British Empire. While it has been well established that British medicine spread around the globe during the colonial period, this book makes the opposite move and follows how the empire made medical knowledge and practice at home in London. Inspired by the anatomical organization of Victorian medical museums, it explores how the encounter between empire and Britain was located in specific organs – the liver, the brain, the eyes, and the blood. Through a series of case studies, the book demonstrates how the exchange between London and the empire was facilitated by mobile bodies of sailors, administrators, missionaries, and military men – but stymied by hierarchies of authority, prestige, race, gender and imperial power.
Inspired by the author’s work as a museum curator, the book is grounded in the personal stories of doctors and patients, and uses material culture to enliven the everyday experience of being a body in the networks of empire. This book that will be of interest to historians, geographers, museologists and general readers with an interest in medicine, empire, disease, environment, mobility, and race.
The book is now available to purchase from the press or from many online sellers in hard back or e-book formats. To request a review copy, please click the button to be directed to the press’s website.
Celebrating the launch of the book in conversation with writer, curator and comedian Subhadra Das.
Anna Greenwood, Social History of Medicine
‘This book might be her first, but it deserves a place on all colonial medical reading lists.’
Vanessa Heggie, H-Net Environmental Humanities
‘I can see livers, sunstroke, and couching as prompts to both undergraduate and graduate students to seek out their own case studies of everyday, understudied diseases that show, as Hussey convincingly argues over the course of the whole book “the human cost of British imperialism at home” (p. 181), as well as the ways in which medicine on British soil was just as much imperial medicine as that practiced in Calcutta or Nairobi.’
Judges Citation, Royal Historical Society Whitfield Prize, 2022
‘[Imperial Bodies in London] brings together postcolonial scholarship with the history of medicine to impressive effect. As well as a superb intellectual achievement, the book is also written with creativity and imagination, bringing to life the physicality of its sources.’