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."
...MoreSimilar Citations
Book
Kathleen M. Brown;
(2023)
Undoing Slavery: Bodies, Race, and Rights in the Age of Abolition
Thesis
Savannah L. Williamson;
(2016)
Caring for Human Property: A Medical Biography of American Slavery, 1808-1865
Thesis
Eric Herschthal;
(2017)
The Science of Antislavery: Scientists, Abolitionism, and the Myth of Slavery's Backwardness
Book
Eric Herschthal;
(2021)
The Science of Abolition: How Slaveholders Became the Enemies of Progress
Thesis
Katherine Johnston;
(2016)
Atlantic Bodies: Health, Race, and the Environment in the British Greater Caribbean
Essay Review
Sasha Turner;
(2018)
Slavery and the Production, Circulation and Practice of Medicine
Article
Rana Hogarth;
(2019)
Of Black Skin and Biopower: Lessons from the Eighteenth Century
Article
Gavin Wright;
(2020)
Slavery and Anglo-American capitalism revisited
Article
Lynne Feeley;
(April 2019)
The Elevationists: Gerrit Smith, Black Agrarianism, and Land Reform in 1840s New York
Article
Fielder, Brigitte Nicole;
(2013)
Animal Humanism: Race, Species, and Affective Kinship in Nineteenth-Century Abolitionism
Book
Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers;
(2019)
They were her property : White women as slave owners in the American South
Article
Rusert, Britt;
(2013)
Delany's Comet: Fugitive Science and the Speculative Imaginary of Emancipation
Chapter
Michelle Zacks;
Kathleen A. Brosnan;
James R. Akerman;
(2021)
Oysters and Emancipation: The Antebellum Shellfish Industry as a Pathway to Freedom
Book
David Chanoff;
Louis W. Sullivan;
(2022)
We'll Fight It Out Here: A History of the Ongoing Struggle for Health Equity
Article
Kopperman, Paul E.;
(2012)
The Attitude of Benjamin Rush (1746--1813) towards Native American Medicine
Book
Wray, Matt;
(2006)
Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness
Book
Kennedy, V. Lynn;
(2010)
Born Southern: Childbirth, Motherhood, and Social Networks in the Old South
Thesis
Hogarth, Rana Asali;
(2012)
Comparing Anatomies, Constructing Races: Medicine and Slavery in the Atlantic World, 1787--1838
Article
Keith Wailoo;
(2020)
Spectacles of Difference: The Racial Scripting of Epidemic Disparities
Book
David Richardson;
(2022)
Principles and Agents: the British slave trade and its abolition
Be the first to comment!