Lindsay McMillan
Published: 21 January 2019
In Cooperation and Conflict: Medicine and Religion on British Caribbean Slave Plantations, 1700-1830.
University of Edinburgh
In Cooperation and Conflict: Medicine and Religion on British Caribbean Slave Plantations, 1700-1830.
Encompassing the ‘long’ eighteenth-century, my research combines medical history, religious history, and race and gender history in an analysis of Atlantic African and British medical and religious beliefs on plantations of the British Caribbean islands. It explores the effects of medical interactions between the enslaved, masters, and British medical professionals and the impact of such interactions on what has been called the “Atlantic world medical complex,” (Londa Schiebinger, 2017).
In the historiography of transatlantic slavery, the centrality of medicine, spiritualism, and religion in shaping the social and cultural experiences of the enslaved within Caribbean plantation society is being steadily uncovered. In similar fashion, my research demonstrates the fundamental ways that African-descended medicine influenced the dynamics of power for those bound by un-free labour, and equally brings to the fore the histories of enslaved peoples characterized not only by their oppression or resistance, but also by their roles as thinkers, intellectuals, and medical professionals in their own right.
First published: 21 January 2019