Black Health on the Plantation: Owners, the Enslaved, and Physicians

Abstract

The lived experiences of slaves and the Souths rationale for slav ery is a topic that intrigues students from all stages of histori cal literacy and allows teachers to explore the meaning of race in the American past. This article presents the relationship among owners, the enslaved, and physicians as a component of the history of medicine (i). Issues of health, disease, and health care in the slave South can provide teachers with effective tools for examining antebel lum southerners' explanations for slav ery and for exploring slave resistance to white domination of all aspects of daily life. White slaveholders dictated the living and working conditions of the roughly four million blacks?most of whom were enslaved?who lived in the antebellum South. Those condi