Medicalizing blackness : making racial differences in the Atlantic world, 1780-1840 /
Rana A. Hogarth.
- Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, (c)2017.
- 1 online resource (xx, 268 pages) : illustrations, maps
Includes bibliographies and index.
Making difference : race and yellow fever. Black immunity and yellow fever in the American Atlantic -- An African corps in a most distressed and sickly condition : yellow fever in the West Indies -- In sickness and slavery : black pathologies. Incorrigible dirt eaters : contests for medical authority on Jamaican plantations -- Of paper trails and dirt eaters : West Indian medical knowledge in the antebellum South -- Disciplining blackness : hospitals. That the asylum for deserted negroes is now complete for their reception : surveillance and sickness in Jamaica -- For the acquisition of practical knowledge : genealogies of medical exploitation in the South.
"In 1748, as yellow fever raged in Charleston, South Carolina, doctor John Lining remarked, 'There is something very singular in the constitution of the Negroes, which renders them not liable to this fever.' Lining's comments presaged ideas about blackness that would endure in medical discourses and beyond. In this fascinating medical history, Rana A. Hogarth examines the creation and circulation of medical ideas about blackness in the Atlantic World during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She shows how white physicians deployed blackness as a medically significant marker of difference and used medical knowledge to improve plantation labor efficiency, safeguard colonial and civic interests, and enhance control over black bodies during the era of slavery. Hogarth refigures Atlantic slave societies as medical frontiers of knowledge production on the topic of racial difference. Rather than looking to their counterparts in Europe who collected and dissected bodies to gain knowledge about race, white physicians in Atlantic slaveholding regions created and tested ideas about race based on the contexts in which they lived and practiced. What emerges in sharp relief is the ways in which blackness was reified in medical discourses and used to perpetuate notions of white supremacy."--
9781469632889 9781469632896
African Americans--Medical care--History.--Southern States Black people--Medical care--History.--Caribbean Area Health and race--History.--Southern States Health and race--History.--Caribbean Area Ethnic groups--Diseases. Medical care--Utilization--History.--Southern States Medical care--Utilization--History.--Caribbean Area Medicine--History--18th century.