Christopher D. E. Willoughby is a historian of slavery and medicine in the United States and Atlantic World
Christopher D. E. Willoughby is a historian of slavery and medicine in the United States and Atlantic World
Description: “Plantations as Landscapes of Medicine” examines how capitalism shaped plantation health as a concept and a lived reality. From diseases of commerce to industrial accidents, physicians treated the ailments of an increasingly capitalist form of agriculture. On the other hand, doctors often wrote about plantations through racial imaginaries of healthy workers and benevolent planters, serving as medical propagandists for the slavocracy.
Description: “A Harvard Physician’s Reports on an 1857 Visit to the Saamaka” is an annotated transcription of Harvard Comparative Anatomist Jeffries Wyman’s trip to Suriname in 1857. There, Wyman made (deeply-flawed) racial science observations about the local enslaved population, and his journal provides important insights into the everyday life of the Saamaka maroon community.
Description: “Running Away from Drapetomania” rethinks the antebellum New Orleans physician and enslaver Samuel A. Cartwright, arguing that understanding his ideas’ (and race science’s more generally) negative influence on American culture requires recognizing how this type of thinking was normative to American medicine in the nineteenth century.
Description: “His Native, Hot Country” relates how concepts of the environment changed over time in early American medical thought about race, explaining that by the time of the U.S. Civil War, physicians advocated for the white supremacist notion that people of African descent were healthiest under the condition of slave labor in the tropics.