Documenting Difference, Documenting Dominance

Abstract

Documenting Difference, Documenting Dominance Karol Kovalovich Weaver (bio) Rana A. Hogarth, Medicalizing Blackness: Making Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780–1840. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina, 2017. xx +268 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $27.95. Rana A. Hogarth's Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780–1840 investigates how medical practitioners in the eighteenth- and-nineteenth-century Atlantic World studied black bodies to improve their own professional standing. Physicians stressed difference between races in relation to disease and the medical spaces where ill health was treated. In so doing, they medicalized blackness. Hogarth does an excellent job integrating diverse primary documents into her source base and contextualizing her research in relation to the relevant historiographic literature. Hogarth asserts that the ways that white medical professionals wrote about black bodies in books, articles, correspondence, and advertisements enhanced the reputation of those medical practitioners, upheld the authority of white persons, and heightened the suffering of enslaved men and women and free people of color. She describes this process as the "textual subjugation of black people's bodies" (p. 20). Within the pages of these written works, black bodies were described and differentiated from those of whites and then these descriptions were disseminated across regions and through time. She calls these publications "intellectual spaces where transnational medical discourses about black people's bodies flourished" (p. 105). Doctors in colonial British America and the antebellum United States, for example, made sure to draw on the expertise of Caribbean physicians who had tended to and written about enslaved persons. Moreover, they marketed their own experience working in the Caribbean when they sought to establish medical practices and institutions in the United States. Hogarth writes that this domination was "continual, deliberate" and also "material" (p. 106). It eventually resulted in black people being confined in restrictive medical spaces, like slave hospitals, and most tragically used as clinical specimens during life and after death. In her conclusion, she warns that many of these ideas about difference are retained in medical texts and practices today. [End Page 549] The book is divided into three parts. The first part concerns yellow fever. The second section concentrates on dirt-eating. The final component focuses on hospitals. Hogarth's investigation of yellow fever shows that medical practitioners and authors' "claim of innate black immunity became a non-trivial piece of information that endured in the descriptions and accounts of the disease" (p. 18). She also argues that these documents were used by "physicians…to showcase their professional prowess" (p. 18). Hogarth stresses that the claim of black immunity led to the exploitation of black bodies. She then highlights how, when evidence appeared to contradict this assertion of natural immunity, physicians remained wedded to it and "manipulated" it for the benefit of their own professional reputations and in service of imperial goals (p. 50). Specifically, she studies the work of William Ferguson and the experience of black recruits in the Caribbean. She explains that, when faced with black soldiers dying from yellow fever, Ferguson shaped his findings to assert that the men were not falling victim to yellow fever, but, instead, were succumbing to dysentery. Hogarth then turns her attention to dirt-eating—a practice to which physicians believed black people in the Atlantic world were susceptible. These medical men made their professional names publishing manuals about the disease and marketing them to non-medical residents of slaveholding colonies and nations. Doctors sought to advertise their professional expertise to slaveholders and overseers and, at the same time, distance themselves from their Atlantic medical competitors, enslaved healers. Ultimately, ideas about dirt-eating that were first articulated in the Caribbean became embedded in American Southern medical treatises and dissertations. These shared ideas were that the disease was "exclusive to black populations," (p. 109), that it was fatal to them, and, thus, that it devastated the labor forces upon which plantations depended. Hogarth writes, "The Southern physician's professional identity depended on the construction of racial pathologies" (p. 106). Just like their West Indian professional forbears, these medical men published to overcome competition from white medical reformers and enslaved healers. They also wrote to convince skeptical plantations...