Citation

Herschthal E. J. Hist. Med. Allied Sci. 2021; ePub(ePub): ePub.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2021, Oxford University Press)

DOI

10.1093/jhmas/jrab042

PMID

34679167

Abstract

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.

Language: en

Keywords

African Americans; Black healing traditions; Black midwives; disease environment; race and gender; race and medicine; racial health disparities; slavery