Article ID: CBB001212674

Caribbean Slavery, British Anti-Slavery, and the Cultural Politics of Venereal Disease (2012)

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Burnard, Trevor (Author)
Follett, Richard (Author)


Historical Journal
Volume: 55, no. 2
Issue: 2
Pages: 427-451

Venereal disease was commonplace among free and enslaved populations in colonial Caribbean societies. This article considers how contemporaries (both in the empire and metropole) viewed venereal infection and how they associated it with gendered notions of empire and masculinity. It further explores how creole medical practices evolved as planters, slaves, and tropical physicians treated sexually transmitted infections. Yet what began as a familiar and customary affliction was seen, by the late eighteenth century, as a problematic disease in the colonies. As medical theory evolved, placing greater attention on behaviour, British abolitionists focused on the sexual excesses and moral failings of Caribbean slaveholders, evidenced by their venereal complaints. The medicalization of venereal infection and its transition from urbane affliction to stigmatized disease helps explain a key problem in imperial history: how and why West Indian planters became demonized as debauched invalids whose sexual excesses rendered them fundamentally un-British. The changing cultural meanings given to venereal disease played an important role in giving moral weight to abolitionist attacks upon the West Indian slave system in the late eighteenth century. This article, therefore, indicates how changing models of scientific explanation had significant cultural implications for abolitionists, slaveholders, and enslaved people alike.

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Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001212674/

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Authors & Contributors
Paugh, Katherine
Blom, Ida
Glick, Megan H.
Jensen, Niklas Thode
Murphy, Kathleen S.
Nogueira, André
Journals
Bulletin of the History of Medicine
Annals of Science: The History of Science and Technology
Asian Medicine: Tradition and Modernity
Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation
Gender and History
História, Ciências, Saúde---Manguinhos
Publishers
University of Minnesota
Cambridge University Press
Nordic Academic Press
Oxford University Press
Stanford University Press
University of Pennsylvania Press
Concepts
Slavery
Disease and diseases
Great Britain, colonies
Medicine
Medicine and politics
Colonialism
People
Petiver, James
Sloane, Hans
Yi, Chunyu
Cassin, Frieda
Ladoo, Harold Sonny
Kincaid, Jamaica
Time Periods
18th century
19th century
17th century
20th century
20th century, late
Ancient
Places
Caribbean
Africa
Atlantic world
Great Britain
Europe
Scotland
Institutions
West India Company
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