Medicine & Power: Authority and British Caribbean Medical Practitioners, 1750-1823

Abstract

In the late eighteenth-century on British Caribbean Plantations, there were dynamic groups of medical practitioners operating within the same physical space. The plantation healthcare system was made up of white doctors and the enslaved people who were trained in European style medicine. Enslaved people had access to alternative medical authorities in the form of Afro-Caribbean medico-spiritual practices that operated outside of the plantation healthcare system implemented by planters. British planters imposed intellectual and physical dehumanization upon enslaved people through the racialization of disease and the plantation healthcare infrastructure, but the medical healing arts that enslaved people practiced, European or Afro-Caribbean, increased their likelihood of survival.