Stephen Kenny

A Dictate of Both Interest and Mercy?: Slave Hospitals in the Antebellum South

As a contribution to debates on slave health and welfare, this article investigates the variety, functions, and overall significance of infirmaries for the enslaved in the antebellum South. Newspapers, case histories, and surviving institutional records of antebellum Southern infirmaries providing medical treatment for slaves offer a unique opportunity to examine the development of modern American medicine within the “peculiar institution,” and to explore a complex site of interactions between the enslaved, physicians, and slave owners. The world of the medical college hospital in South Carolina and an experimenting clinic in Alabama are reconstructed using newspapers and medical case histories. The Patient Register of the Hotel Dieu (1859–64) and the Admission Book of Touro Infirmary (1855–60) are used to highlight the types of enslaved patients sent to these two New Orleans commercial hospitals and to explore connections between the practice of medicine and the business of slave trading in the city. In addition to providing physicians with a steady income, slave infirmaries were key players in the domestic slave trade, as well as mechanisms for professionalization and the mobilization of medical ideas in the American South.

Power, opportunism, racism: Human experiments under American slavery

• Slave patients and black bodies were key to the growth of southern medicine. • Slaves also presented white doctors with opportunities for experimental research. • There were significant patterns to medical experiments on enslaved people. • The exploitation of enslaved patients for experiments was commonplace. • The culture of American slavery facilitated and gave impetus to experiments on slaves.

African American Slavery and Disability

informed by the hemispheric context. Considering the importance of mobility and fluidity of identity in shaping individuals’ participation in the Mississippi Valley slave regime, our understanding of the perceived boundaries of the market and of appropriate violence would likely benefit from an assessment of comparative experiences in a framework that is more explicitly informed by borderland studies. These are, however, forward-looking concerns, rather than direct criticisms, and as scholars continue to assess the relationship between the economic terms of capitalism and slavery, Rothman has set a course that one hopes he will continue to follow.