Herschthal, Eric (Author)
The scholarship on slavery, health, and healing has dramatically transformed over the past two decades. This essay synthesizes several themes within the thriving subfield, highlighting its relevance to historians of medicine and science working in adjacent fields, and suggesting new directions forward. The recent scholarship builds on research begun in the 1970s, but where earlier scholarship relied on quantitative methods and retrospective diagnoses, the new scholarship takes a social constructivist approach. Scholars today are exploring how slavery shaped the natural and built environment to create new disease environments in the New World; how Black healing knowledge was either circulated or suppressed by White physicians; and how gender and race intersected in slave societies to influence diagnoses and the categorization of specific diseases. Most importantly, the new scholarship suggests that medical knowledge produced in slave societies was not marginal—but central—to the rise of early modern medicine. The lack of any synthesis of the recent literature, combined with the recent public attention given to racial health disparities, make this literature vitally important to all historians of medicine and allied sciences. It can provide useful insights for scholars working in other areas, and it can diversify and complicate the stories we tell about the origins of modern medicine.
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Thesis
Ivy, Nicole;
(2013)
Materia Medica: Black Women, White Doctors and Spectacular Gynecology in the Ninteenth-Century U.S.
(/isis/citation/CBB001567508/)
Book
Lindemann, Mary;
(1999)
Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe
(/isis/citation/CBB000110602/)
Article
Theresa L. Tyers;
(2016)
‘In the Merry Month of May’: Instructions for Ensuring Fertility in MS British Library, Lansdowne 380
(/isis/citation/CBB552800787/)
Article
Gimmela, Millie;
(2008)
Hacia una reconsideración del Códice de la Cruz Badiano: nuevas propuestas para el estudio de la medicina indígena en el período colonial
(/isis/citation/CBB001030966/)
Chapter
Amanda Herbert;
(2020)
Spas for the sick poor in the early modern British Atlantic world
(/isis/citation/CBB114278202/)
Book
Ssandra Cavallo;
Tessa Storey;
(2017)
Conserving Health in Early Modern Culture: Bodies and Environments in Italy and England
(/isis/citation/CBB468254838/)
Article
Jennifer Evans;
(2019)
Patients, Practitioners and Lodgers: Male Sexual Health Patients’ and their Healers’ Use of Location in Early Modern Medical Encounters
(/isis/citation/CBB719752994/)
Article
Ekirch, A. Roger;
(2015)
The Modernization of Western Sleep: Or, Does Insomnia have a History?
(/isis/citation/CBB001550489/)
Article
Coste, Joël;
(2011)
Le concept de médicalisation en histoire sociale de la médicine et de la santé: une analyse épistémologique et méthodologique
(/isis/citation/CBB001220906/)
Article
Hurwitz, Brian;
Dupree, Marguerite W.;
(2013)
Learning from Lister: Antisepsis, Safer Surgery and Global Health
(/isis/citation/CBB001320251/)
Article
McCleery, Iona;
(2011)
Medical “Emplotment” and Plotting Medicine: Health and Disease in Late Medieval Portuguese Chronicles
(/isis/citation/CBB001210656/)
Article
Volker Scheid;
(2018)
Promoting Free Flow in the Networks: Re-imagining the Body in Early Modern Suzhou
(/isis/citation/CBB545376910/)
Article
William Eamon;
(2018)
Corn, Cochineal, and Quina: The “Zilsel Thesis” in a Colonial Iberian Setting
(/isis/citation/CBB085994099/)
Article
Carlo Ginzburg;
(2017)
Schemi, preconcetti, esperimenti a doppio cieco. Riflessioni di uno storico
(/isis/citation/CBB147802268/)
Book
Weiner, Marli Frances;
Hough, Mazie;
(2012)
Sex, Sickness, and Slavery: Illness in the Antebellum South
(/isis/citation/CBB001450238/)
Book
Henry Louis Gates Jr;
Andrew S. Curran;
(2022)
Who’s Black and Why?: A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race
(/isis/citation/CBB584439647/)
Book
Andrés Avelino de Orihuela;
(2021)
The Sun of Jesús del Monte: A Cuban Antislavery Novel
(/isis/citation/CBB985131973/)
Book
Delle, James A.;
Mrozowski, Stephen A.;
Paynter, Robert;
(2000)
Lines that Divide: Historical Archaeologies of Race, Class, and Gender
(/isis/citation/CBB000101650/)
Book
Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy;
(2020)
Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean
(/isis/citation/CBB216430099/)
Thesis
Jazmin Antwynette Evans;
(2019)
Scientific Racism's Role in the Social Thought of African Intellectual, Moral, and Physical Inferiority
(/isis/citation/CBB578195827/)
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