Melancholia, Slavery, and Racial Pathology in Eighteenth-Century Cuba

Capitalist ideas of productivity became central to medicine under slavery. They shaped how physicians treated enslaved patients, crafted a scientific basis for medicine, and conceived of themselves as professionals. Between the late-eighteenth-century and the mid-nineteenth-century, white male physicians in Louisiana and Cuba distinguished themselves from other healers: first, by aligning with Spanish colonialism, and then, by making themselves essential to a new form of plantation management that used clock-time discipline, hierarchical divisions of labor, and complex accounting systems. These technologies helped planters track the hours and days each enslaved person spent working, eating, sleeping, birthing, suffering from sickness and injuries, and recovering. This in turn enabled precise interpretations of enslaved health in terms of productivity, which was primarily measured in work time and the number of commodities produced. Physicians, who were seeking a rigorous intellectual foundation for medical knowledge production, latched onto planter methods of calculating and controlling enslaved health. One of those methods was what planters and physicians called “sick time,” which was an allotment of time away from work intended to manage illness enough for enslaved people to return to work. However, as physicians used plantation management to cast an air of scientific accuracy over their knowledge, enslaved people reconfigured their own medical practices to make themselves less visible and countable. Fugitive practices involving trees, animals, and natural springs helped enslaved people to heal by taking their own forms of sick time.

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Migrant Clinics and Hookworm Science: Peripheral Origins of International Health, 1840–1920

Palmer¹

2009

bhm

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This article proposes a global history of hookworm disease based on the main scientific publications on hookworm disease (ankylostomiasis) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and archival sources from the Rockefeller Foundation's International Health Board. The location of hookworm research is explained by the presence of large concentrations of migrant laborers who suffered from serious hookworm disease in frontier regions during the second industrial revolution. This hookworm disease pandemic was not the result of a linear spread of infection. The extraordinary labor conditions in these regions created ideal ecologies for the reproduction of the parasite, leading to levels of infection that produced ankylostomiasis. The major findings in hookworm science came from research-oriented physicians building new institutions of medical science in peripheral nation-states. In a number of Latin American states their work led to treatment programs conceived in national terms that preceded the interest of Rockefeller philanthropy in the disease. The Rockefeller Foundation incorporated these programs in order to launch its International Health hookworm eradication program in 1914.

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Melancholia, Slavery, and Racial Pathology in Eighteenth-Century Cuba

Cited by 12 publications

References 6 publications

Indigenous Medicine, Official Health, Medical Pluralism

Indigenous Medicine, Official Health, Medical Pluralism

Sick Time: Medicine, Management, and Slavery in Louisiana and Cuba, 1763–1868

Migrant Clinics and Hookworm Science: Peripheral Origins of International Health, 1840–1920

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