2025 Linda and Charles Wilson Lecture in Humanities in Medicine
The Ratio of Mortality: Army Medical Statistics and the Values of Disease
Starts at
5:00 pm
Lied Center for Performing Arts
Room: Lied Commons
Target Audiences:
301 N 12th St
Lincoln NE 68508
Lincoln NE 68508
Additional Info: LIED
Contact:
Cindy Ermus, cermus2@unl.edu
In an essay recently published in the *Journal of the American Medical Association*, MD Steven Woolf informs us that rates of mortality due to Covid-19 in the US peaked in 2021, at 104 deaths per 100,000 population, falling to 44 per 100,000 in 2022, and 15 per 100,000 in 2023. Of course, such numbers are contestable: what, after all, counts as a ‘Covid Death’? Here, however, our speaker Dr. Suman Seth of Cornell University (bio below) is less interested in arguing over units of data than in understanding the metric deployed. What is the history of a ‘rate of mortality,’ defined as the ratio of deaths to overall population? Drawing on material from his latest book, *Mortality and Measurement: Race-Medicine, Statistics, and the Making of Empire*, Seth shows that the ‘ratio of mortality’ emerged first, at least in Britain, in an imperial context, as a way of comparing the dangers of particular diseases across varying climates. His larger arguments are twofold. First, that medical metrics have complex histories, and the questions we can answer—indeed, the questions we can ask—are shaped by the materials we collect. Second, and most broadly, the histories of medicine and colonialism are still thoroughly with us, even in the most seemingly straightforward measures.
Biographical Blurb:
Suman Seth is the Marie Underhill Noll Professor of the History of Science and Chair of the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University. He received his Ph.D. in History from Princeton University in 2003. He published his first book, *Crafting the Quantum: Arnold Sommerfeld and the Practice of Theory, 1890-1926*, with MIT Press in 2010. His second book, *Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire*, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018. He is the editor of a special issue of *Postcolonial Studies* (2009), on “Science, Colonialism, Postcoloniality;” of a FOCUS section of *Isis* (2014) on “Re-Locating Race;” and—with Erika Milam—of *BJHS Themes* on the *Descent of Darwin* (2021). He has a paper out in the latest (2024) issue of *Osiris*, on *Disability and the History of Science*, entitled “A Decided Inaptitude in His Constitution:” Race, Slavery, and Disability in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire.
Biographical Blurb:
Suman Seth is the Marie Underhill Noll Professor of the History of Science and Chair of the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University. He received his Ph.D. in History from Princeton University in 2003. He published his first book, *Crafting the Quantum: Arnold Sommerfeld and the Practice of Theory, 1890-1926*, with MIT Press in 2010. His second book, *Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire*, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018. He is the editor of a special issue of *Postcolonial Studies* (2009), on “Science, Colonialism, Postcoloniality;” of a FOCUS section of *Isis* (2014) on “Re-Locating Race;” and—with Erika Milam—of *BJHS Themes* on the *Descent of Darwin* (2021). He has a paper out in the latest (2024) issue of *Osiris*, on *Disability and the History of Science*, entitled “A Decided Inaptitude in His Constitution:” Race, Slavery, and Disability in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire.
