The Political Body
This book investigates how slaves experienced illness and the practice of medicine, as well as the ways in which physicians sought to understand race and sex, in the antebellum South. It shows that doctors who tried to define health and sickness for men and women, black and white, also had to contend with the realities of a slaveholding society. Slaveholders often defined slaves as healthy enough to work when the slaves considered themselves to be sick. At the same time, slaveholders wanted to protect their financial investment in the bodies of slaves and so had incentive to provide medical care for them. Slaves had their own beliefs about bodily differences and the causes of sickness as well as how to cure them, but their beliefs were seldom validated or their practices respected by slaveholders and doctors. In order to elucidate medical and lay perspectives on the political body in the antebellum old South, the book draws on evidence from a variety of sources, including medical journals and texts, physicians' diaries, and slave narratives and folklore for slaves.