Article ID: CBB919025060

Slavery, Health, and Healing Now: The State of the Field (2022)

unapi

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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Authors & Contributors
Theresa L. Tyers
Orihuela, Andrés Avelino de
Evans, Jazmin Antwynette
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.
Kimani S. K. Nehusi
Luis-Brown, David
Concepts
Medicine
Health
Historiography
Racism
Slavery and slaves
Colonialism
Time Periods
Early modern
19th century
20th century
21st century
18th century
Medieval
Places
England
Europe
Great Britain
Southern states (U.S.)
Peru
Cuba
Institutions
Royal Society of London
Royal College of Surgeons, London
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