Secret Cures of Slaves People, Plants, and Medicine in the
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Londa Schiebinger
SECRET
CURES
of Slaves
people, plants, and medicine
in the eighteenth-century atlantic world
stanford university press • stanford california
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
© 2017 by Londa Schiebinger. All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University
Press.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Schiebinger, Londa L., author.
Title: Secret cures of slaves : people, plants, and medicine in the eighteenth-century
Atlantic world / Londa Schiebinger.
Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2017. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016049163 (print) | LCCN 2016051270 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781503600171 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503602915 (pbk. : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781503602984 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Human experimentation in medicine—West Indies—History—18th
century. | Slaves—Health and hygiene—West Indies—History—18th century. |
Blacks—Medicine—West Indies—History—18th century. | Traditional medicine—
West Indies—History—18th century. | Tropical medicine—West Indies—History—
18th century.
Classification: LCC R853.H8 S347 2017 (print) | LCC R853.H8 (ebook) |
DDC 610.72/408996073—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016049163
For Robert
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CONTENTS
List of Figures ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
Medical Experimentation in the Atlantic World 4
Human Subjects 5
The Taxonomy of Experiments 8
The Colonial Crucible 12
The Circulation of Knowledge 13
The Problem of Sources 14
1. The Rise of Scientific Medicine 19
Experimentation in the West Indies 21
The Science of Skin Color,
or the Physiological Niceties of Race 24
L’Homme Planté: Place Versus Race 35
2. Experiments with the Negro Dr’s Materia Medica 45
Bois Fer and the Circulation of Knowledge 50
The African Hypothesis 51
The European Hypothesis 57
The American Hypothesis 57
The Greater Atlantic Hypothesis 61
3. Medical Ethics 65
Ethics in Europe:
“To Help, or at Least to Do No Harm” 66
Ethics in the West Indies: The Question of Slaves 71
Who Goes First? Experiments with Cold Water 79
Slaves: A Protected Category? 86
viii Contents
4. Exploitative Experiments 91
Quier’s Smallpox Experiments 92
Thomson’s Yaws Experiments 99
Soldiers and Sailors 106
Children and the Poor in Europe 109
Are Bodies Interchangeable? The Medical Context 112
5. The Colonial Crucible: Debates over Slavery 117
Obeah and Sorcery 118
Experiments with Placebos 123
Outlawing Slave Medical Practitioners 126
The Professional Exclusion of Gens de Couleur Libres 130
Are Bodies Interchangeable? The Colonial Context 133
Advocating Better Living Conditions 139
Experiments with Breeding 142
Conclusion: The Circulation of Knowledge 147
The European Colonial Nexus 147
The African Slave Trade Nexus 153
The Amerindian Conquest Nexus 156
Agnotology and the Atlantic World Medical Complex 158
Appendix:
Featured British and French Doctors in the West Indies 167
Notes 169
Bibliography 203
Image Credits 223
Index 225
FIGURES
1. Atlantic World circa 1774. 2
2. The West Indies circa 1774. 3
3. The circulation of knowledge in the eighteenth-century
Atlantic World medical complex. 14
4. Cap-Français, Saint-Domingue, 1779. 23
5. Analysis of race, Médéric-Louis-Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry. 27
6. Thermometer circa 1800. 36
7. The first of Colin Chisholm’s six experimental groups. 39
8. Colin Chisholm’s six experimental groups. 40
9. An early image of yaws. 53
10. Entry for bois de fer, Jean-Baptiste Pouppé-Desportes. 58
11. Bois de fer, Jean-Baptiste-Christophe Fusée-Aublet. 60
12. West Gondwana. 61
13. Negro Dr as knowledge broker. 63
14. William Wright (1735–1819). 73
15. Plan of the hospital for sick slaves, Good Hope Estate,
Jamaica, circa 1798. 77
16. Edward Jenner’s lancet. 93
17. Burning of Cap-Français. 118
18. Elisha Perkins’s metallic tractors. 124
19. The European colonial nexus, the flow of knowledge
between Europe and the Americas. 148
20. The African slave trade nexus, the flow of knowledges, diseases,
people, medicines, and plants from Africa to the Americas. 154
21. The conquest nexus, Amerindian knowledge in the plantation
medical complex. 157
22. Agnotological barriers in the Atlantic World medical complex. 159
ix
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing history has changed. Over the years I worked on this book, vast
resources became available online. My thanks to the diligent souls whose
fingers are at times anonymously captured in the scans as they copy the pages
of rare and valuable books, and to the Web designers who have improved
the interfaces with these materials over the years. I have nearly an entire
century and a half of rare books now downloaded to my own computer—
and I can print out, mark up, and make notes on 250-year-old texts! Rather
than traveling to Paris, Aix-en-Provence, London, Edinburgh, Jamaica, and
beyond, scholars now have valuable texts at their fingertips. Texts can be
consulted many times, perused without taking copious handwritten notes,
searched, and generally enjoyed. Images are printable. Much can be learned
by searching Eighteenth-Century Collections online—what a resource!
Although one loses the tactile pleasure of eighteenth-century papers and
leather bindings, one does not miss the mold, dust, jet lag, and hours wait-
ing for things to be delivered to the reading-room table. Now one can read
Jean-Barthélemy Dazille while taking breaks to do laundry (the benefits—
physical and intellectual—of interspersing heavy-duty research and writing
with mundane chores should not be underestimated). Nothing, of course,
replaces travel to the places where the history was made to experience first-
hand the people, sights, sounds, heat, and complexity of various environ-
ments. And nothing substitutes for research in the archives and talks with
knowledgeable librarians and archivists.
Many thanks are due for the making of this book. My imagination was
jolted and my learning advanced during my sabbatical year at the Stanford
Humanities Center, where new ways of visualizing historical data have sprung
up in the past decade. I benefited greatly from my colleagues there—especially
Caroline Winterer, Nicole Coleman, Paula Findlen, and Dan Edelstein—who
have devised new ways to map the Republic of Letters. “Seeing” data is ex-
citing, and this book represents my first attempts at mapping the circulation
xi
xii Acknowledgments
of people, plants, and medicine in the Atlantic World. None of this would
have been possible without my collaboration with Erik Steiner, Codirector
of the Spatial History Project at the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis
(CESTA), Stanford University. Erik took my raw concepts and rendered them
with visual elegance. Across this entire process, he provided exacting technical
skills, frameworks, and guidance along with much good humor. It was difficult
reducing what might have been beautifully layered colored images to two di-
mensions in black and white for print on paper. I might have done a complete
Web production (similar to genderedinnovations.stanford.edu), but since this
is a history project I have chosen a traditional mode of intellectual conveyance.
Books are still wonderful to hold in your hand.
My thanks go, too, to the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung for support
for the research freedom that started this project. Lorraine Daston’s gracious
hospitality during my stay at the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsge-
schichte and the excellent Moral Authority of Nature group made for an auspi-
cious beginning. I thank the National Science Foundation (grant no. 0723597)
and the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health (grant
no. 1162326), for supporting this work. Any conclusions are mine and do not
necessarily reflect the views of the NSF or NLM. A special thanks to Marcella
Phillips, National Archives of Jamaica; the very helpful Biodiversity Heritage
Library; the Wellcome Library; Drew Bourn, Historical Curator, Stanford
Medical History Center, Lane Medical Library; and Mary Munill, Interlibrary
Borrowing, Stanford University Libraries.
James Delbourgo, James McClellan, and François Regourd offered excel-
lent comments on the manuscript. Other colleagues and audiences also thought
along with me throughout the process. These included Mary Pickering, my
dear friend from graduate school; Hal Cook and his Early Modern Drug Trade
in the Atlantic World Conference, Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of
Medicine at University College London; Bernard Bailyn and the International
Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, Harvard University; Theresa
Levitt and Deirdre Cooper Owens, who organized the Porter Fortune Sympo-
sium on Science, Medicine, and the Making of Race, University of Mississippi;
the Historisches Seminar, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt;
and Paula Findlen, who directed the Empires of Knowledge: Scientific Net-
works in the Early Modern World workshop at Stanford University. A special
thanks to the many patient students who read large portions of this book in
seminar and offered helpful comments; to Hannah LeBlanc, who helped with
notes and bibliography; and to Halley Barnet, who did some last-minute re-
search for me in Paris.
Acknowledgments xiii
Earlier versions of portions of this book have been published elsewhere
as “Human Experimentation in the Eighteenth Century: Natural Boundar-
ies and Valid Testing,” in The Moral Authority of Nature, ed. Lorraine Daston
and Fernando Vidal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 384–408;
“Scientific Exchange in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World,” in Sound-
ings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500–1825,
ed. Bernard Bailyn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009),
294–328, reprinted in Waltraud Ernst, ed., Ethik—Geschlecht—Medizin:
Körpergeschichten in politischer Reflexion (Berlin: LIT, 2010), 41–69; “Medi-
cal Experimentation and Race in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World,”
Social History of Medicine 26, no. 3 (2013): 364–82, reprinted in The History of
Science, ed. Massimo Mazzotti (London: Routledge, 2015); and “The Atlantic
World Medical Complex,” in Empires of Knowledge: Scientific Networks in the
Early Modern World, ed. Paula Findlen (New York: Routledge, forthcoming).
I thank these journals, editors, and presses for their interest in my work.
Finally, to Robert Proctor, Geoffrey Schiebinger, and Jonathan Proctor, as
always, my love.
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SECRET CURES OF SLAVES
