The Doctor's Slaves

The Doctor's Slaves PDF Author: Robert K Summers
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780578487489
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 90

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Book Description
All of the historical accounts of Dr. Samuel A. Mudd's life focus on his conviction as one of the eight persons tried for conspiracy in the 1865 assassination of president Abraham Lincoln. But Dr. Mudd was also a farmer who relied on slave labor to plant and harvest his tobacco crops. This book is the story of the lives of those men and women. Dr. and Mrs. Mudd acquired at least nine slaves between 1859 and 1864. Their first five slaves were documented in the 1860 Federal Slave Census. They were a 26-year-old man, a 19-year-old girl, a 10-year-old boy, an 8-year-old girl, and a 6-year-old girl. The 26-year-old man was Elzee Eglent. The 19-year-old woman was his sister, Mary Simms. The 14-year-old boy was their brother, Milo Simms. The two little girls were called sisters, but their different last names suggest they were not. We do know they were orphans. The 8-year-old girl was Lettie Hall. The 6-year-old girl was Louisa Cristie. Four additional slaves were acquired between 1860 and 1864. They were Rachel Spencer, Richard Washington, Melvina Washington, and Frank Washington. Rachel Spencer probably came from the plantation of Henry Lowe Mudd where her mother Lucy Spencer, her sister Maria Spencer, and her brothers Baptist Spencer and Joseph Spencer were slaves. Maria Spencer was married to William Hurbert, a slave on Susanna Mudd's plantation in nearby Prince George's County. Richard Washington, Melvina Washington, and Frank Washington came from the Dyer plantation. After the Civil War started, some of Dr. Mudd's slaves ran away to Washington, D.C. where slavery was abolished in 1862., or joined the Union Army which began enlisting former slaves in 1863. Others left the farm after the State of Maryland abolished slavery in November 1864. Three of Dr. Mudd's slaves remained on the farm after emancipation and were still there at the time of the 1870 Federal census. Not much is known about the slaves' lives before Dr. Mudd became involved in the Lincoln assassination. Slave owners didn't normally keep records of slaves' births, marriages, deaths, or other events in their lives. Most of what we know about Dr. Mudd's slaves comes from testimony by and about them at the Lincoln conspiracy trial, as reported in this book. After the trial, the lives of most of Dr. Mudd's former slaves faded once again from public view. However, research for this book uncovered interesting information about some of their post-slavery lives, and is reported in this book. This includes former slave Lettie Hall Dade's account of John Wilkes visit to the Mudd farm immediately following the assassination.

The Doctor's Slaves

The Doctor's Slaves PDF Author: Robert K Summers
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780578487489
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 90

Get Book Here

Book Description
All of the historical accounts of Dr. Samuel A. Mudd's life focus on his conviction as one of the eight persons tried for conspiracy in the 1865 assassination of president Abraham Lincoln. But Dr. Mudd was also a farmer who relied on slave labor to plant and harvest his tobacco crops. This book is the story of the lives of those men and women. Dr. and Mrs. Mudd acquired at least nine slaves between 1859 and 1864. Their first five slaves were documented in the 1860 Federal Slave Census. They were a 26-year-old man, a 19-year-old girl, a 10-year-old boy, an 8-year-old girl, and a 6-year-old girl. The 26-year-old man was Elzee Eglent. The 19-year-old woman was his sister, Mary Simms. The 14-year-old boy was their brother, Milo Simms. The two little girls were called sisters, but their different last names suggest they were not. We do know they were orphans. The 8-year-old girl was Lettie Hall. The 6-year-old girl was Louisa Cristie. Four additional slaves were acquired between 1860 and 1864. They were Rachel Spencer, Richard Washington, Melvina Washington, and Frank Washington. Rachel Spencer probably came from the plantation of Henry Lowe Mudd where her mother Lucy Spencer, her sister Maria Spencer, and her brothers Baptist Spencer and Joseph Spencer were slaves. Maria Spencer was married to William Hurbert, a slave on Susanna Mudd's plantation in nearby Prince George's County. Richard Washington, Melvina Washington, and Frank Washington came from the Dyer plantation. After the Civil War started, some of Dr. Mudd's slaves ran away to Washington, D.C. where slavery was abolished in 1862., or joined the Union Army which began enlisting former slaves in 1863. Others left the farm after the State of Maryland abolished slavery in November 1864. Three of Dr. Mudd's slaves remained on the farm after emancipation and were still there at the time of the 1870 Federal census. Not much is known about the slaves' lives before Dr. Mudd became involved in the Lincoln assassination. Slave owners didn't normally keep records of slaves' births, marriages, deaths, or other events in their lives. Most of what we know about Dr. Mudd's slaves comes from testimony by and about them at the Lincoln conspiracy trial, as reported in this book. After the trial, the lives of most of Dr. Mudd's former slaves faded once again from public view. However, research for this book uncovered interesting information about some of their post-slavery lives, and is reported in this book. This includes former slave Lettie Hall Dade's account of John Wilkes visit to the Mudd farm immediately following the assassination.

Doctors and Slaves

Doctors and Slaves PDF Author: Richard B. Sheridan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521102384
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In this study Professor Sheridan presents a rich and wide-ranging account of the health care of slaves in the British West Indies, from 1680-1834. He demonstrates that while Caribbean island settlements were viewed by mercantile statesmen and economists as ideal colonies, the physical and medical realities were very different. The study is based on wide research in archival materials in Great Britain, the West Indies and the United States. By steeping himself in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sources, Professor Sheridan is able to recreate the milieu of a past era: he tells us what the slave doctors wrote and how they functioned, and he presents a storehouse of information on how and why the slaves sickened and died. By bringing together these diverse medical demographic and economic sources, Professor Sheridan casts new light on the history of slavery in the Americas.

Medical Bondage

Medical Bondage PDF Author: Deirdre Cooper Owens
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820351342
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
The accomplishments of pioneering doctors such as John Peter Mettauer, James Marion Sims, and Nathan Bozeman are well documented. It is also no secret that these nineteenth-century gynecologists performed experimental caesarean sections, ovariotomies, and obstetric fistula repairs primarily on poor and powerless women. Medical Bondage breaks new ground by exploring how and why physicians denied these women their full humanity yet valued them as “medical superbodies” highly suited for medical experimentation. In Medical Bondage, Cooper Owens examines a wide range of scientific literature and less formal communications in which gynecologists created and disseminated medical fictions about their patients, such as their belief that black enslaved women could withstand pain better than white “ladies.” Even as they were advancing medicine, these doctors were legitimizing, for decades to come, groundless theories related to whiteness and blackness, men and women, and the inferiority of other races or nationalities. Medical Bondage moves between southern plantations and northern urban centers to reveal how nineteenth-century American ideas about race, health, and status influenced doctor-patient relationships in sites of healing like slave cabins, medical colleges, and hospitals. It also retells the story of black enslaved women and of Irish immigrant women from the perspective of these exploited groups and thus restores for us a picture of their lives.

Secret Cures of Slaves

Secret Cures of Slaves PDF Author: Londa Schiebinger
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503602982
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
“Engaging unique sources . . . Londa Schiebinger untangles the complex relationships between European and local physicians, healers, plants, and slavery.” —François Regourd, Université Paris Nanterre In the natural course of events, humans fall sick and die. The history of medicine bristles with attempts to find new and miraculous remedies, to work with and against nature to restore humans to health and well-being. In this book, Londa Schiebinger examines medicine and human experimentation in the Atlantic World, exploring the circulation of people, disease, plants, and knowledge between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. She traces the development of a colonial medical complex from the 1760s, when a robust experimental culture emerged in the British and French West Indies, to the early 1800s, when debates raged about banning the slave trade and, eventually, slavery itself. Massive mortality among enslaved Africans and European planters, soldiers, and sailors fueled the search for new healing techniques. Amerindian, African, and European knowledges competed to cure diseases emerging from the collision of peoples on newly established, often poorly supplied, plantations. But not all knowledge was equal. Highlighting the violence and fear endemic to colonial struggles, Schiebinger explores aspects of African medicine that were not put to the test, such as Obeah and vodou. This book analyzes how and why specific knowledges were blocked, discredited, or held secret. “In this urgent, probing and visually striking volume, Londa Schiebinger, one of the pioneers of feminist and colonial science studies, shifts our understanding of Enlightenment racial attitudes to the domain of the medical, making a vital contribution to the dynamic new wave of research on science and slavery in the Atlantic world.” —James Delbourgo, Rutgers University

Medicalizing Blackness

Medicalizing Blackness PDF Author: Rana A. Hogarth
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469632888
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
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.

For the Health of the Enslaved

For the Health of the Enslaved PDF Author: Niklas Thode Jensen
Publisher: Museum Tusculanum Press
ISBN: 8763531712
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
In the first half of the 19th century, the safeguarding of the health of the enslaved workers became a central concern for plantation owners and colonial administrators in the Danish West Indies. With the end of the slave trade, the longstanding excess mortality in the hardworking enslaved population became a crucial problem for the colony because the slaves could no longer be replaced. This book explores the health conditions of the enslaved workers and the health policies initiated by planters and the colonial government. The investigation reveals that, in a comparative Caribbean perspective, Danish West Indian health policies were often quite unique and efficient, but also that the health of the enslaved was a contested field, showing an ongoing power struggle between the planters, the colonial administration, and the slaves themselves.

Birthing a Slave

Birthing a Slave PDF Author: Marie Jenkins Schwartz
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674034929
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 414

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Book Description
The deprivations and cruelty of slavery have overshadowed our understanding of the institution's most human dimension: birth. We often don't realize that after the United States stopped importing slaves in 1808, births were more important than ever; slavery and the southern way of life could continue only through babies born in bondage. In the antebellum South, slaveholders' interest in slave women was matched by physicians struggling to assert their own professional authority over childbirth, and the two began to work together to increase the number of infants born in the slave quarter. In unprecedented ways, doctors tried to manage the health of enslaved women from puberty through the reproductive years, attempting to foster pregnancy, cure infertility, and resolve gynecological problems, including cancer. Black women, however, proved an unruly force, distrustful of both the slaveholders and their doctors. With their own healing traditions, emphasizing the power of roots and herbs and the critical roles of family and community, enslaved women struggled to take charge of their own health in a system that did not respect their social circumstances, customs, or values. Birthing a Slave depicts the competing approaches to reproductive health that evolved on plantations, as both black women and white men sought to enhance the health of enslaved mothers--in very different ways and for entirely different reasons. Birthing a Slave is the first book to focus exclusively on the health care of enslaved women, and it argues convincingly for the critical role of reproductive medicine in the slave system of antebellum America.

Medical Apartheid

Medical Apartheid PDF Author: Harriet A. Washington
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 076791547X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 530

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Book Description
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • The first full history of Black America’s shocking mistreatment as unwilling and unwitting experimental subjects at the hands of the medical establishment. No one concerned with issues of public health and racial justice can afford not to read this masterful book. "[Washington] has unearthed a shocking amount of information and shaped it into a riveting, carefully documented book." —New York Times From the era of slavery to the present day, starting with the earliest encounters between Black Americans and Western medical researchers and the racist pseudoscience that resulted, Medical Apartheid details the ways both slaves and freedmen were used in hospitals for experiments conducted without their knowledge—a tradition that continues today within some black populations. It reveals how Blacks have historically been prey to grave-robbing as well as unauthorized autopsies and dissections. Moving into the twentieth century, it shows how the pseudoscience of eugenics and social Darwinism was used to justify experimental exploitation and shoddy medical treatment of Blacks. Shocking new details about the government’s notorious Tuskegee experiment are revealed, as are similar, less-well-known medical atrocities conducted by the government, the armed forces, prisons, and private institutions. The product of years of prodigious research into medical journals and experimental reports long undisturbed, Medical Apartheid reveals the hidden underbelly of scientific research and makes possible, for the first time, an understanding of the roots of the African American health deficit. At last, it provides the fullest possible context for comprehending the behavioral fallout that has caused Black Americans to view researchers—and indeed the whole medical establishment—with such deep distrust.

Medicine and Slavery

Medicine and Slavery PDF Author: Todd Lee Savitt
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252008740
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
Widely regarded as the most comprehensive study of its kind, this volume offers valuable insight into the alleged medical differences between whites and blacks that translated as racial inferiority and were used to justify slavery and discrimination. In Medicine and Slavery, Todd L. Savitt evaluates the diet, hygiene, clothing, and living and working conditions of antebellum African Americans, slave and free, and analyzes the diseases and health conditions that afflicted them in urban areas, at industrial sites, and on plantations.

Sex, Sickness, and Slavery

Sex, Sickness, and Slavery PDF Author: Marli F. Weiner
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252094077
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Marli F. Wiener skillfully integrates the history of medicine with social and intellectual history in this study of how race and sex complicated medical treatment in the antebellum South. Sex, Sickness, and Slavery argues that Southern physicians' scientific training and practice uniquely entitled them to formulate medical justification for the imbalanced racial hierarchies of the period. Challenged with both helping to preserve the slave system (by acknowledging and preserving clear distinctions of race and sex) and enhancing their own authority (with correct medical diagnoses and effective treatment), doctors sought to understand bodies that did not necessarily fit into neat dichotomies or agree with suggested treatments. Focusing on Southern states from Virginia to Alabama, Weiner examines medical and lay perspectives on the body through a range of sources, including medical journals, notes, diaries, daybooks, and letters. These personal and revealing sources show how physicians, medical students, and patients--both free whites and slaves--felt about vulnerability to disease and mental illnesses, how bodily differences between races and sexes were explained, and how emotions, common sense, working conditions, and climate were understood to have an effect on the body. Physicians' authority did not go uncontested, however. Weiner also describes the ways in which laypeople, both black and white, resisted medical authority, clearly refusing to cede explanatory power to doctors without measuring medical views against their own bodily experiences or personal beliefs. Expertly drawing the dynamic tensions during this period in which Southern culture and the demands of slavery often trumped science, Weiner explores how doctors struggled with contradictions as medicine became a key arena for debate over the meanings of male and female, sick and well, black and white, North and South.