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

Abstract

This volume offers new perspectives on medicine and slavery in the Atlantic World. Overall, the editors’ goal is to recover the voices and actions of black and indigenous peoples through “reading [texts] against the grain” of texts often produced for a different purpose by whites. The geographical scope of these chapters is deliberately wide, moving across time and space in an attempt to break through the various partitions of slavery studies. Thus, the first three chapters under the heading “Knowledge” draw as much from anthropological and archaeological sources as they do from more traditional historical texts. In a consideration of indigenous/African healing and magical rituals on the island of Hispaniola, Lauren Derby resurrects the Taino, the island’s indigenous people long considered extinct by historians. She finds their healing stones and magical caves survived via mixture with African slave-healing rites.Likewise, Chelsea Berry and Mary E. Hicks look at African attitudes toward poisoning (Berry, Surinam) and bloodletting rituals (Hicks, Salvador da Bahia, Brazil) using legal cases and other records. Like Derby, both of these historians explore the power of black practitioners in resisting the white enslavers, and their ability to carve out positions of authority over their own and other slave bodies. Berry finds 102 poison cases in her data set drawn from trial records. Hicks uses newspaper advertisements for the barbers who provided broader health services, as well as white voices describing black medical practices.The second section of the book clusters three chapters about the “experience” of medicine and healing. Deirdre Owens’ chapter employs haptic (touch) studies literally and metaphorically, as when mental patients are described as being “out of touch” with their surroundings, or white men touch black bodies uninhibitedly. Elise Mitchell reconsiders the prevailing historiography of slaves feigning illness. Instead of seeing this tactic as a mode of resistance, Mitchell asks us to recognize the “unbelievable suffering” that such reports reveal. The slaveholder is the one who applied the label “feigned illness”; his or her projection of this category onto the bodies of ill slaves was a process of dehumanization, as well as an excuse to force work from slaves no matter how much pain wracked their bodies.Brandi M. Waters draws attention to the process of manumission as a strategy for slaveholders to deal with disabled slaves. In such dealings, the slaveholders accepted that the weakened slave had limited residual productivity, lower re-sale value, and the prospect of needing long-term maintenance. Waters’ case study from Columbia, which examines the process from the slave’s point of view, finds that slaves wanted the freedom to choose their own health-care practitioner, whose care might well be at odds with that of the slaveowner. Waters’ work allows a rare glimpse into the agency of slave patients in resisting regular medicine.The final section, “Profession,” looks at how U. S. medical doctors exploited slave patients to create a racialized medicine and assert authority over slave bodies and their diseases. Rana Hogarth explores an early slave hospital in Charleston, where a white doctor treated slaves just removed from ships who were too ill to be sold or whose ill health was inconvenient. In the second chapter, Timothy Lockley revisits the oft-repeated claim that blacks did not fall victim to yellow fever. His novel contribution is to see a transition from assigning this immunity by skin color to attributing it to blood. He also finds observers commenting that “mulattos” of various percentages were less well protected. Finally, Leslie Schwalm reviews the many ways that white northern physicians interrogated black bodies during the U.S. Civil War.A brief prologue by Vanessa Gamble and an epilogue by Sharla M. Fett round out this impressive collection. This valuable book will hopefully inspire further scholarship and additional conferences. In the introduction, the editors listed several goals for their enterprise—to decentralize Western medicine in the lives of slaves; to engage multiple concepts of illness within slave life; and to expand understanding of the master–slave relationship. This book, which addresses all these concerns, should be especially useful to young scholars exploring new ways of approaching this most fraught topic of Western history.