Rebecca C. Haddaway (Author)
Mulford, Carla (Advisor)
Colebrook, Claire (Advisor)
Pennsylvania State University
Mulford, Carla
Colebrook, Claire
Physical Details: 230
Language: English
"In Medical Discourse and Antislavery Resistance in the Early American Republic, I contend that American abolitionists of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw the human body differently from their pro-slavery peers. Many American and European medical texts and images of the antebellum period envisioned the bodies of marginalized people as other than human, reflecting the entanglement of body politics, economics, and knowledge production in the Atlantic world at this time. By contrast, abolitionists and other people who condemned slavery wrote about and illustrated the body from a holistic and place-based perspective that fit their antislavery narrative, offering an alternative way of seeing and creating medical and embodied cultural knowledge. This project approaches abolitionist visions of the body through the lenses of the health humanities and critical geography, analyzing texts across genres including medical writing, petitions, historical writing, anatomical illustration, cartography, and documentary war illustration to tell an alternative history of how early Americans saw and understood the body. I argue that abolitionists built their concept of the body in consideration of material and spiritual dimensions of embodiment, the significance of spatial imaginaries to local and transatlantic community building, and a transhistorical view of violence on and healing of the body. Ultimately, abolitionists saw the body in a manner uniquely rooted in Atlantic histories of oppression and a vision of a free and just future. I look to moments of antislavery resistance in American and transatlantic contexts to chart the relationship between abolitionist political activism and antislavery ways of seeing and understanding embodiment. Chapter 1 examines Black antislavery resistance to bodysnatching in 1788 New York City. Chapter 2 presents an analysis of abolitionist concepts of public health during the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia. Chapter 3 explores abolitionist images and imaginaries of the violence of U.S. American and Caribbean slavery, focusing on disfigurement and the Haitian Revolution. I conclude with a reflection on the significance of antislavery histories to present-day conversations about the body, politics, and healthcare."
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