Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery ed. by Sean Morey Smith and Christopher D. E. Willoughby

Abstract

Reviewed by: Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery ed. by Sean Morey Smith and Christopher D. E. Willoughby Nora Doyle (bio) Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery. Edited by Sean Morey Smith and Christopher D. E. Willoughby. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021. Pp. 240. Cloth, $45.00.) Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery continues the conversations begun during a symposium on medicine and healing in the age of slavery that took place at Rice University in 2018. The essays in this collection center the knowledge and experiences of enslaved people in a range of Atlantic world contexts, while also revealing how state and medical authorities used medical knowledge and practice to shape ideas about race and to assert control over enslaved bodies. Spanning the early sixteenth century to the late nineteenth century and considering such locations as West Africa, Brazil, the Caribbean, and the United States, the essays offer an exciting glimpse into new directions in the history of slavery and medicine. Inspired by the work of such scholars as Sharla Fett, whose epilogue concludes the volume, this collection decenters Western medical traditions [End Page 243] and emphasizes the ways in which healing practices were embedded in the social dynamics of slave societies and communities of enslaved people. There were many traditions of health and healing that defined the Atlantic world between 1500 and 1900, and often these traditions contained unexpected similarities. The transmission and exchange of knowledge and practice created new contexts of cooperation and contestation, contributed to the formation of new identities and new concepts of race, and allowed enslaved people to develop creative strategies of self-healing. The volume is organized thematically around the concepts of knowledge, experience, and profession, further reinforcing the ways in which histories of healing traverse more traditional boundaries of geography and periodization. The three essays that constitute the first section, on knowledge, explore healing traditions that were indigenous to Africa and the Americas and the ways these traditions persisted and evolved in the face of colonization and slavery. These essays highlight the roles that Africans and Native Americans played as healers and purveyors of knowledge. Mary E. Hicks’s essay centers the practices of Black barbers and Brazilian sangradores, who drew on West African healing traditions to develop “adaptive strategies of bodily restoration” (64). The practice of bloodletting was particularly significant in that it drew on West African traditions, but also shared important similarities with European healing practices, giving the practitioners significant credibility in the eyes of European colonial and medical authorities. This relationship changed over time, however, and by the late eighteenth century, European physicians began to insist on the superiority of their medical knowledge and to minimize other healing traditions as superstition rather than science. The essays in this section highlight the diverse traditions of knowledge that sometimes converged and sometimes competed in the Atlantic world, giving rise to distinctive practices and social relations of healing. The three essays in the second part of the volume focus on enslaved people’s experiences of illness and healing and highlight the contested nature of the medical archive. Beginning with a meditation on methodology by Deirdre Cooper Owens, the essays point to new interpretations and new approaches that recover the lived experiences of enslaved people and the strategies they used to control their own health and medical care. Elise A. Mitchell’s essay reexamines cases of feigned illness among enslaved women to recover their very real experiences of illness and injury. While previous scholars have interpreted accusations of feigned illness as instances of resistance, Mitchell argues that enslaved women in particular were often falsely accused of feigning illness because of slaveholders’ [End Page 244] racialized and gendered beliefs about deception and suffering. She suggests that these cases were defined by real suffering (and sometimes healing), and she calls on scholars to focus on “the crucial quotidian work of survival, self-reliance, and self-advocacy that happened in the thick of slavery” (112). The essays in this section emphasize the emotional and physical experiences of enslaved people and, as Brandi M. Waters writes, explore the many strategies enslaved people used to “pursue healing on their own...