Ship fever, confinement, and the racialization of disease

Abstract

This paper presents the case of ship fever as a disease whose colonial origins and description by English-speaking physicians contributed to the racialization of European and African bodies in the second half of the eighteenth century. Historicizing ship fever as a disease associated with the health of sympathetic White soldiers and sailors, and notions that enslaved Africans were less vulnerable to a disease caused by confinement, contributes to ongoing analyses of the intersection of medicine, race, and slavery in the British Atlantic world after the Seven Years' War.