African Health at Home and Abroad

Abstract

In the nineteenth century, annual reports of European military medical authorities usually carried some such title as “The Health of the Army at Home and Abroad.” Though historians have recently studied the health of slaves in transit and the demographic patterns of slave populations in the New World, they have not paid much attention to these military data. For the West Indies they begin in 1803, for West Africa in 1810. After 1819, it is possible to trace the disease patterns of West Indian and West African populations in the last decades of the slave trade and on into the early twentieth century. These records help to show what happened epidemiologically to populations of African descent that crossed the Atlantic in both directions.