Health: An Overview

Like many facets of everyday life on southern slave plantations, health and illness concerns carried social and political significance as well as medical exigencies. Given that African American bondpeople were forced to live a precarious existence as both human beings and as objects of legal property, the well-being of their physical bodies became a site for real medical concern and a place for conflict between slave and slave owner. The harsh living and work conditions for slaves coupled with injuries from accidents and punishments produced a reality where disease, death, and high infant mortality were far too common. Historians of slavery and medicine have focused on different aspects of slaves' health—from diseases common to slave plantations, to the use of slaves' bodies for medical experimentation by white practitioners, and to the various types of medical remedies used by whites and blacks on southern plantations. Regardless of historical focus, it is clear that the issue of slave health was always an issue of social power as much as it was a medical one.

Many white plantation owners believed that whites and blacks fared differently in southern climates and reacted differently to various diseases. For example, white doctors often commented on blacks' perceived resistance to malaria and yellow fever, stating that black southerners seemed better suited to surviving these diseases. Similarly, many white doctors claimed that blacks were particularly vulnerable to respiratory illnesses. Modern historians still debate, to some degree, the accuracy of these ideas. There appears to be evidence that descendents of West African regions are more likely to carry a genetic condition called "Duffy Antigen," which does provide resistance to certain types of malaria, thus making it likely that some imported slaves could have fared better than their Euro-American counterparts. However, in the case of respiratory illness, the biological differences suggested by white southern doctors obscures slaves' social and living conditions that may have caused many of the illnesses. Poor, drafty living quarters along with inadequate clothing and diet were no doubt important factors in everyday health issues for African Americans. African American slaves also suffered from high infant mortality rates, much higher than that of southern white families. Disease, malnutrition, and living conditions created a reality in which vulnerable, fragile infants had to struggle to survive.

When a slave became sick, he or she had to decide whether to tell the master and receive medical attention from his family physician or attempt to seek medical remedy from a fellow slave who may have practiced root medicine and/or conjure. Conjure is part of the long tradition of hoodoo, a rich and sophisticated practice of magic and spells transported from West Africans to America during the slave trade. Conjure had important implications for many southern slaves who believed that the use of spells and the conjuring of spirits could wield powerful effects on a person's health, as both a harming and a healing force. Root doctors and conjure doctors were an important part of life for African American slaves who were still enmeshed in the cultural and religious practices of African tradition, because many felt strongly that white medicine was not effective or accurate in treating their illnesses and afflictions. Thus conjure and root doctors were held in positions of high esteem among African Americans and were considered by many to have special communion with God. Maintaining their cultural heritage of medicinal practices was one of the ways African American bondpeople asserted their own cultural autonomy in the face of overwhelming oppression.

SOUTHERN MYTHS ABOUT SLAVES' HEALTH

In the early nineteenth century many southern slave owners began subscribing to a new system of thought called scientific racism. Scientific racism was a set of ideas and beliefs grounded in scientific language that attempted to justify white supremacy and racebased slavery. One example of this type of thinking is the abundance of medical myths about the bodies of slaves purported by white southern doctors and scientists. For example, some southern whites claimed to believe that black people felt less pain than other people, thus justifying long and grueling labor schedules and cruel physical punishments. Similarly, many white southerners believed that black women suffered less than white women during pregnancy and childbirth. This belief was used to justify the forced labor of pregnant women, and helped to construct an idea that black women were meant to be heavy breeders, another justification for slavery. Also, it was a commonly held myth that blacks were better suited to working in intense heat than whites. While modern science has rejected this idea, showing that whites and blacks acclimate to warm weather conditions in similar ways, the myth helped legitimize the institution of slavery in scientific terms. The lesson for historians is that science is only a product of human beings, and as such will always be subject to human bias and error.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fett, Sharla. Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

Savitt, Todd L. Medicine and Slavery: The Disease and Health Care of Blacks in Antebellum Virginia. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978.

Savitt, Todd L. Race and Medicine in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century America. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2007.

Stowe, Steven M. Doctoring the South: Southern Physicians and Everyday Medicine in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

Typically, white planters took great interest in the health of their slaves, possibly out of humanitarian impulses, but most likely out of economic concerns. Plantation owners were dependent upon the labor slaves provided, thus slaves' health was essential to the economic success of white planters. Most white plantation owners preferred to have slaves treated by their own white physicians, or by a member of the white family. Southern white women often took on the task of tending to the daily medical needs of slaves, treating illness, issuing vaccinations, and assisting in childbirth. White planters often did not understand traditional African remedies, and thus viewed the arts of root medicines and conjure as nothing more than superstition. Slaves, however, had good reason to fear the medical treatment of white doctors. Antebellum medicine often contained violent remedies, such as bleeding, during which a certain amount of blood is drained from a patient; and blistering, usually along the temples, neck, and back; and drug-induced vomiting and diarrhea. In short, the medical remedies of nineteenth-century medicine could potentially cause more harm than the illness itself. However, in a society where the white planter literally owned the bodies of his slaves, insisting on white medical remedy was one way a slave holder could assert social dominance over the lives of bondpeople.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fett, Sharla. Working Cures: Healing, Health and Power on Southern Slave Plantations. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

Griffith, R. Marie. Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

Morgan, Jennifer. Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.

Savitt, Todd L. Medicine and Slavery: The Disease and Health Care of Blacks in Antebellum Virginia. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978.

Savitt, Todd L. Race and Medicine in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century America. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2007.

Schwartz, Marie Jenkins. Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.

Stowe, Steven M. Doctoring the South: Southern Physicians and Everyday Medicine in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

                                        Jamie Warren