Slave Health and Medicine

Slave health care is a complicated issue. Slave medical encounters involve not only the doctor and the patient, but also the owner. Previous historians have often used health care to support their claims as to the harshness or benignity of slavery as an institution. Many slaveowners did attempt to provide what they considered adequate health care to their slaves. In many cases, this care was identical to that provided to their families and to themselves. Physicians often had contracts with slaveowners to care for everyone under their control which often proved to be a lucrative practice. Living and laboring in the south, slaves were affected by the same sorts of health problems, related to the climate and environment, as were whites. Southern physicians and others claimed a distinctive disease environment for the south, one that needed their expertise as Southern physicians. In this unit, we will consider the role that race played in antebellum southern health care.

In the antebellum South, the medical experiences of African American slaves were very different from those of Whites. This difference was mainly found in the matter of control of the slave's body. When a slave was sick, who decided the appropriate course of action? Most slaves preferred that these healthcare decisions remain within the slave community. Slave owners, on the other hand, usually considered decisions of this nature to be their prerogative.

Todd Savitt, who has written extensively about slave health and medicine in Virginia, addresses this matter of control in a book he wrote to accompany an exhibit at the Virginia Historical Society several years ago.  For a useful comparison of slaves' and whites' health experiences, see "Medical Life in Antebellum Virginia":

This question is not easy to answer. Most slaves, whether literate or not, didn't leave behind written records, letters or diaries describing their feelings and experiences. However, a few did and in the 1930s, under the auspices of the WPA's Federal Writers Project, thousands of former slaves were interviewed. Among the questions they were asked were those dealing with the health care they and others in their community received. These inteviews are available today for researchers and others interested in the experiences of slaves in their own words. Read some excerpts of narratives dealing with slave health care. If you want to learn more about the ex-slave narratives, check out following links:

• Documenting the American South: The Southern Experience in 19th century America. (Especially the section entitled Narratives on Slavery and First-Person Narratives of the American South, 1860-1920).
• African-American Mosaic Exhibition, Library of Congress, Ex-Slave Narratives
• WPA
• Federal Writers' Project
• American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers Project, 1936-1940
• Excerpts from Slave Narratives, edited by Steven Mintz.
• Link to thesis entitled Bodies of Knowledge: The Influence of Slaves on the Antebellum Medical Community, by Sarah Mitchell Cotton

Blacks in the antebellum south often had little control over their own bodies. This is seen clearly in the cases of slave bodies being used for medical experimentation by white doctors. Todd Savitt addresses this subject in an article entitled, "The Use of Blacks for Medical Experimentation and Demonstration in the Old South," in The Journal of Southern History, August 1982, pp. 331-348.

What role did race play in antebellum Southern health care?