In fact, many of the tools that we are using to control the pandemic-observation, surveillance and data collection-developed not from scientific inquiry in isolated laboratories, but rather as urgent responses to crises that arose due to the transatlantic slave trade and the expansion of the British empire. But those crises have not only been of the medical variety, and knowing more about that history provides an important lesson for those living through the pandemic today. Protocols about how to control an epidemic mostly develop in the middle of crises. What most don’t understand is that the field of epidemiology is always like that.

The Plymouth committee 's broadside utilised a cut-away diagram of the interior of the Brooks at the top and the image that would become another iconic abolitionist image: a slave in chains, hands raised, asking, 'Am I not a Man and a Brother?'.Since the outbreak of COVID-19, many have been frustrated by the ways in which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ( CDC) keeps changing its rules and response to the pandemic. The Brooks was chosen as an example by the abolitionists because it was the first ship on Parrey's list, well-known in the trade and typical of this type of vessel. It is possible that Pitt himself leaked Parrey's findings to the Plymouth and London abolitionist committees. The Brooks itself was an actual people-carrying slave ship, one of 26 surveyed in Liverpool, under instructions received from the prime minister, William Pitt, by Captain Parrey of the Royal Navy. It came to epitomize the cruelties of the trade in enslaved Africans of the 18th and 19th centuries and the struggle to abolish that trade.

It was published in Bristol the following year and would be redrawn and republished many times in Britain and America in the years that followed. The slave ship Brooks was first drawn and published in an abolitionist broadside by William Elford and the Plymouth chapter of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade in November 1788.

Facts about the brookes slave ship