Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery

"To date, every scholarly book on the history of medicine and slavery has a single author. Each is thus beholden to the practical limitations of single-authored texts. "Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery," by contrast, brings together scholars of diverse places and empires around the Atlantic to make a novel intervention into these histories by including diverse actors, wide-ranging periodization, and spanning across multiple empires. Contributors provide perspectives on sites in Africa, Europe, and the Americas. They examine the historical constructions of health and medicine among indigenous Americans, enslaved and free Africans and their descendants, and Europeans and Euro-Americans. The collection serves as a state-of-the-field picture of the history of slavery and medicine. Contributors include several award-winning historians, such as Lauren Robin Derby, Sharla Fett, and Leslie Schwalm; authors of important, recent monographs on slavery and medicine, such as Deirdre Cooper Owens and Rana Hogarth; and emerging scholars in the field of slavery and medicine. The variety of contributors in terms of rank, expertise, and experience allows the volume to take stock of the past, present, and future of a field of inquiry whose development has accelerated in the last decade. "Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery" illuminates the everyday practices of dealing with disease and illness that were fundamental to the order of slavery and the construction of race. The history of medicine and healing is a core facet of the early Atlantic World: bodies both sick and well were specific sites for contests of power, cultural exchange, and identity-making. The volume demonstrates how larger cosmologies of the Atlantic World-such as Enlightenment rationalism, Taino Zemis (stone idols), and various Afro-Atlantic spiritual traditions from Haitian Voodoo to Yoruba-constructed medicine and healing. Not only are the chapters in the collection topically diverse, they collectively cover the temporal breadth of Atlantic slavery. Essays span from the early enslavement of indigenous people in the Caribbean to the emancipation of slaves in the United States. Likewise, contributors consider the British, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Dutch empires. By breaking down traditional temporal and geographical borders, the contributors ask to what degree the spaces of enslavement around the Atlantic shared the experienced disease, healing, and medicine, and to what degree they were historically specific and contingent. The volume complicates Western biomedicine's assumptions as a unique healing tradition, revealing how its modern instantiation depended to a significant extent on the bodies and expertise of enslaved and free people of color in colonial spaces. Ultimately, the collection uses this comprehensiveness to argue that medical and healing traditions framed the Atlantic slave system's lived experience. Its essays' foundational nature positions the volume to provoke future studies in both medical and Atlantic history"--