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.

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

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.

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.

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African American Slave Medicine offers a critical examination of how African American slaves' medical needs were addressed during the years before and surrounding the Civil War. Dr. Herbert C. Covey inventories many of the herbal, plant, and non-plant remedies used by African American folk practitioners during slavery.

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.