In the first half of the 19th century, the safeguarding of the health of the enslaved workers became a central concern for plantation owners and colonial administrators in the Danish West Indies. With the end of the slave trade, the longstanding excess mortality in the hardworking enslaved population became a crucial problem for the colony because the slaves could no longer be replaced. This book explores the health conditions of the enslaved workers and the health policies initiated by planters and the colonial government. The investigation reveals that, in a comparative Caribbean perspective, Danish West Indian health policies were often quite unique and efficient, but also that the health of the enslaved was a contested field, showing an ongoing power struggle between the planters, the colonial administration, and the slaves themselves.

Working Cures explores black health under slavery showing how herbalism, conjuring, midwifery and other African American healing practices became arts of resistance in the antebellum South and invoked conflicts.

This study re-evaluates the field known as Negro/Slave Medicine, which has traditionally focused on the efforts of slaveowners to provide medical care for their slaves, addressing the slaves' proactive management of medical care; brutality as a cause of the constant need for medical attention; and the health risks posed by arduous agricultural labor. This groundbreaking study offers insight into the health problems facing enslaved people, their attempts to deal with the causes and effects of illness and injury, and the slave owners' attitudes toward the medical treatment of slaves. The appendices present valuable data on the medical treatment of enslaved African Americans from the Touro Infirmary Archives that have never before been published.

Widely regarded as the most comprehensive study of its kind, this volume offers valuable insight into the alleged medical differences between whites and blacks that translated as racial inferiority and were used to justify slavery and discrimination. In Medicine and Slavery, Todd L. Savitt evaluates the diet, hygiene, clothing, and living and working conditions of antebellum African Americans, slave and free, and analyzes the diseases and health conditions that afflicted them in urban areas, at industrial sites, and on plantations.

The accomplishments of pioneering doctors such as John Peter Mettauer, James Marion Sims, and Nathan Bozeman are well documented. It is also no secret that these nineteenth-century gynecologists performed experimental caesarean sections, ovariotomies, and obstetric fistula repairs primarily on poor and powerless women. Medical Bondage breaks new ground by exploring how and why physicians denied these women their full humanity yet valued them as “medical superbodies” highly suited for medical experimentation. In Medical Bondage, Cooper Owens examines a wide range of scientific literature and less formal communications in which gynecologists created and disseminated medical fictions about their patients, such as their belief that black enslaved women could withstand pain better than white “ladies.” Even as they were advancing medicine, these doctors were legitimizing, for decades to come, groundless theories related to whiteness and blackness, men and women, and the inferiority of other races or nationalities. Medical Bondage moves between southern plantations and northern urban centers to reveal how nineteenth-century American ideas about race, health, and status influenced doctor-patient relationships in sites of healing like slave cabins, medical colleges, and hospitals. It also retells the story of black enslaved women and of Irish immigrant women from the perspective of these exploited groups and thus restores for us a picture of their lives.

Fitness expert Amy Bento Ross hosts this low impact walking oriented fitness program, set to the exciting beats of hip hop, offering the benefits of a real cardio workout in a nonstop motivational format. ~ Cammila Albertson, Rovi

CONTENTS: Foreword, Vanessa Northington Gamble “Introduction: Healing and the History of Medicine in the Atlantic World,” Sean Morey Smith and Christopher D. E. Willoughby “Zemis and Zombies: Amerindian Healing Legacies on Hispaniola,” Lauren Derby “Poisoned Relations: Medical Choices and Poison Accusations within Enslaved Communities,” Chelsea Berry “Blood and Hair: Barbers, Sangradores, and the West African Corporeal Imagination in Salvador da Bahia, 1793–1843,” Mary E. Hicks “Examining Antebellum Medicine through Haptic Studies,” Deirdre Cooper Owens “Unbelievable Suffering: Rethinking Feigned Illness in Slavery and the Slave Trade,” Elise A. Mitchell “Medicalizing Manumission: Slavery, Disability, and Medical Testimony in Late Colonial Colombia,” Brandi M. Waters “A Case Study in Charleston: Impressions of the Early National Slave Hospital,” Rana A. Hogarth “From Skin to Blood: Interpreting Racial Immunity to Yellow Fever,” Timothy James Lockley “Black Bodies, Medical Science, and the Age of Emancipation,” Leslie A. Schwalm “Epilogue: Black Atlantic Healing in the Wake,” Sharla M. Fett