Controlling Healthy Populations: Medicine, Biopolitics, and Racial Politics in Spanish New Orleans, 1763–1803

Abstract

Controlling Healthy Populations:Medicine, Biopolitics, and Racial Politics in Spanish New Orleans, 1763–1803 Liana DeMarco (bio) Sometime in early August 1794, a free woman of African descent named Margarita Goton faced off against her former enslaver and current employer in a courtroom in Pensacola, Florida. Goton alleged that Dr. Juan Rubí, first surgeon of the Spanish Royal Hospital of Pensacola, was refusing to pay her the remaining balance of her wages from ten years' work at the hospital. Rubí had already captured the vast majority of Goton's earnings per her contract to become coartada, or legally no longer a slave. Rubí had purchased Goton in New Orleans in 1781, but in 1784 the two agreed that Rubí would emancipate Goton after she paid him the equivalent of her market value. Ten years later the price was paid and she had her freedom, but by her calculations Rubí had taken 1,235 pesos on top of the coartación sum he had agreed to. At one point, Goton threatened to withhold her labor until she received her money, stating that she "would not spend any more time in service of the hospital and would retire that very night." She would accept being paid in installments, but, according to the court record, she wanted Rubí "to certify her total payment in writing so that if there were any more delays in her payments, she would have the official record she needed to get the money she was owed." Goton's confidence in the courtroom stemmed from her understanding that people like her were essential to Spanish colonial medicine and public health. She worked in a colonial hospital similar to those in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Havana where, more often than not, enslaved and free people of African descent did the vast majority of everyday work, from sweeping the floors to treating patients. Nonetheless, Juan Rubí refused flat out to pay her, arguing that he had a right to all of Goton's wages after being, in his words, "so liberal and generous in giving [End Page 447] her freedom at price and without interest." He declared Goton's threats meaningless, saying that the hospital did not need her labor. Goton, who clearly believed the exact opposite, was caught off guard.1 This legal case illuminates key themes in the history of medicine and public health in the late-eighteenth-century Spanish Atlantic world. Spanish medicine was moving away from its traditional basis in Iberian scholasticism, as its practitioners became more interested in using reason to reveal rational explanations for the human body, illness, and disease.2 Yet historians of Spanish colonial medicine in Mexico, Peru, and Guatemala have shown that people of African descent and Indigenous people were heavily involved in the Spanish state's efforts to heal the sick, fight infectious disease, and extract local medical knowledge. For example, colonial officials often worked with Indigenous medical practitioners during smallpox inoculation campaigns in Guatemala and Peru, not just because the Spanish needed the labor, but also because they recognized the skills of Indigenous practitioners and the efficacy of their medical knowledge.3 Similar social dynamics existed along the Spanish Gulf Coast of North America, and especially in New Orleans, where people of African descent were the backbone of colonial medicine and public health. Between 1763 and 1803, New Orleans was not only a military outpost for the Spanish empire but also a pivotal site of state-led biopolitical projects and transformations in medical authority. The Spanish believed that the management of healthy, racialized populations—what I call [End Page 448] here biopolitics—was essential for the economic development of New Orleans and Louisiana as a whole.4 Upon claiming the city from the French after the Seven Years' War, Spanish officials set out to order the urban landscape and to expand the medical and public health infrastructure to support growing populations of enslaved laborers and white settlers. To do so, they relied heavily on the labor of free and enslaved people of African descent, but not out of pragmatism alone. For centuries, people of all backgrounds in the Spanish Atlantic had trusted medical practitioners of African...