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We are a public forum committed to collective reasoning and the imagination of a more just world. Join today to help us keep the discussion of ideas free and open to everyone, and enjoy member benefits like our quarterly books.
Zachary Dorner is a historian of medicine and commerce. He is Assistant Clinical Professor in the University Honors program at the University of Maryland, College Park, and author of Merchants of Medicines: The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain’s Long Eighteenth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2020).
Global trade, enslaved labor, and colonial warfare created demands for medicines that would work for anyone, anywhere. That pressure to view patients as interchangeable remains with us today.
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