Historians of slavery have come a long ways since the days of Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, Stanley Elkins, even Eugene D. Genovese. An evolving field ever since its scholars put pen to paper, the last decade has perhaps witnessed the greatest upheaval in the study of human bondage. A flurry of innovative, imaginative, and ground-breaking interpretations have lifted enslaved peoples far and away from what was once the stultifying position assigned them by Ulrich Phillips. Slaves talk back, act back, and fight back. In the process, they, as much as those who claimed proprietorship over their bodies, gave shape and meaning to America’s “peculiar institution.”
Sharla M. Fett locates herself securely within this new interpretive framework. Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations adds yet another dimension to the unceasing struggle by enslaved peoples to reclaim, in this case nearly literally, their bodies from the master’s grasp. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including private papers, Works Project Administration interviews, and antebellum medical treatises, Fett redirects our attention away from a previous focus on medical therapies and toward the implicitly political contests that erupted between masters and slaves over the purposes and performance of healing.
Taking up first the meanings and methods Southern practitioners–slave and free–brought to their healing work, Fett demonstrates that slaves understood sickness (and its obverse–health) in relational terms. Social disruptions (jealousy, anger, fear) were as likely to result in illness and disability as were disease, injury, and poor diet. From the perspective of the enslaved, healing thus required attention be paid to community as well as corporal afflictions. To perform this work, slave healers (midwives, conjurors, diviners, and herbalists) selected from among a lengthy menu of strategies. Some of which they appropriated from their owners; some they borrowed from Native Americans; some they imported from Africa. Thus a healer might appeal to a Christian God, serve a tea steeped in the indigenous Jerusalem oak, or use divination to trace an “illness to its origins in social conflict.”
Sharla M. Fett locates herself securely within this new interpretive framework. Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations adds yet another dimension to the unceasing struggle by enslaved peoples to reclaim, in this case nearly literally, their bodies from the master’s grasp. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including private papers, Works Project Administration interviews, and antebellum medical treatises, Fett redirects our attention away from a previous focus on medical therapies and toward the implicitly political contests that erupted between masters and slaves over the purposes and performance of healing.
Taking up first the meanings and methods Southern practitioners–slave and free–brought to their healing work, Fett demonstrates that slaves understood sickness (and its obverse–health) in relational terms. Social disruptions (jealousy, anger, fear) were as likely to result in illness and disability as were disease, injury, and poor diet. From the perspective of the enslaved, healing thus required attention be paid to community as well as corporal afflictions. To perform this work, slave healers (midwives, conjurors, diviners, and herbalists) selected from among a lengthy menu of strategies. Some of which they appropriated from their owners; some they borrowed from Native Americans; some they imported from Africa. Thus a healer might appeal to a Christian God, serve a tea steeped in the indigenous Jerusalem oak, or use divination to trace an “illness to its origins in social conflict.”
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