Advanced Praise for Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery

Thomas Kuhn wrote that “a paradigm is prerequisite to perception.” Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery, an exciting, chronologically expansive, global volume that liberates African diasporic medicine from the paradigm of the dominant Western medical gaze. Yet it is one thing to escape the confines of a straitened medical gaze and quite another to meticulously document the wider historical prospect. This dynamic collection of papers from a 2018 symposium at Rice University does both persuasively.

Its compulsively readable, harmonious and far-ranging assortment of papers limns parallels between sangradores and European barber-surgeons, acknowledges the primacy of non-Western advances such as smallpox variolation and details the integration of social and musical dimensions to supplement biophysiological care that once were widely dismissed as cultural curiosities of ‘primitives’. Engaging writing and arresting insights stud its pages.

You won’t be able to put this book down and you will emerge with a fresh, deep education in the contemporary understanding and future directions of medical history largely freed of the historical blinders of race.

―Harriet A. Washington, author of "Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present"

Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery is a major contribution to the fields of medical history, the history of slavery, and the history of the Atlantic world. The book brings together an impressive and diverse group of experts to create a uniquely broad and rich picture of the intersecting histories of slavery and medicine. Straddling social, economic, political, and cultural history, the essays in this volume make explicit the complicit work that the early modern state and the medical establishment played in the modeling of ideas about race, labor, and colonialism. More fundamentally, and by emphasizing the histories of people of African descent, the volume signals a fundamental shift in the field of medical history. It makes clear that any work exploring the intersections between medicine and slavery has to depart from a serious engagement with the world views, narratives, and lived experiences of Black historical actors (including healers and patients). This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of healing in the Atlantic World, the history of slavery, and, more generally, the histories of medicine and healing.

―Pablo F. Gómez, author of "The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic"

Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery is at the cutting-edge of the history of medicine and slavery. By placing enslaved people at the center of the volume, this emerging-generation of scholars quite brilliantly embody the promise of Diasporic studies. Their essays persuasively decenter Western biomedical frameworks as the exclusive driving force in investigating the history of medicine and health.

―Jim Downs, author of "Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction"

This remarkably rich collection, spanning diverse healing traditions across the Atlantic World unsettles easy assumptions about the dominance of western biomedicine. Centering the complex and highly contested interactions among Europeans, Africans, and the indigenous peoples of the Americas, the collection rises above monolithic understandings about medicine. Medicine’s deep entanglement and debt to coloniality and enslavement can no longer be rendered invisible thanks to the erudition of this broad range of interdisciplinary, international scholars.

―Sasha Turner, author of "Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica"

Reviews of Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery

“Ultimately, Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery is a groundbreaking interdisciplinary collection of essays that illuminates the connections between Atlantic medicine, diverse healing practices, and conceptions of race, within the greater Atlantic World in the age of slavery and traces the origins of medical systems and inequities of today.”

Savannah L. Williams, Reviewed in the Civil War Book Review (Spring 2022). Access it here.

“Each book contributes immensely on its own to the rich contextualization of distinct but connected medically plural landscapes in the Atlantic world as well as the violent and unequal power dynamics that shaped the forms, functions, and processes by which medical knowledge operated on each side of the ocean, with Kananoja focusing largely on West-Central Africa and the essays in Smith and Willoughby’s volume attending largely to the Western Hemisphere.”

-Matt Heaton. Review of Kananoja, Kalle, Healing Knowledge in Atlantic Africa: Medical Encounters, 1500-1850 and Smith, Sean Morey; Willoughby, Christopher D. E., eds., Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery. H-Africa, H-Net Reviews. May, 2022. Read it here.

Table of Contents

Foreword, Vanessa Northington Gamble

Introduction: Healing and the History of Medicine in the Atlantic World, Sean Morey Smith and Christopher D. E. Willoughby

1. Zemis and Zombies: Amerindian Healing Legacies on Hispaniola, Lauren Derby

2. Poisoned Relations: Medical Choices and Poison Accusations within Enslaved Communities, Chelsea Berry

3. Blood and Hair: Barbers, Sangradores, and the West African Corporeal Imagination in Salvador da Bahia,
1793–1843, Mary E. Hicks

4. Examining Antebellum Medicine through Haptic Studies, Deirdre Cooper Owens

5. Unbelievable Suffering: Rethinking Feigned Illness in Slavery and the Slave Trade, Elise A. Mitchell

6 Medicalizing Manumission: Slavery, Disability, and Medical Testimony in Late Colonial Colombia,
Brandi M. Waters

7. A Case Study in Charleston: Impressions of the Early National Slave Hospital, Rana A. Hogarth

8. From Skin to Blood: Interpreting Racial Immunity to Yellow Fever, Timothy James Lockley

9. Black Bodies, Medical Science, and the Age of Emancipation, Leslie A. Schwalm

Epilogue: Black Atlantic Healing in the Wake, Sharla M. Fett