Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (review)

Who controlled the bodies of enslaved African Americans: the slaves or the slave owners? Sharla Fett convincingly argues that this conflict shaped healing, health, and power on southern slave plantations, the partial title of this excellent book. Conflicts between slaveholders and the slave community about proper treatments for illness "went to the heart of planter interests in curtailing African American self-determination" (141). The care that enslaved healers provided sick slaves validated their humanity and reinforced a definition of self that challenged the "soul murder" (7) and "routine dehumanization" of slavery (199).

The central argument of this work is that enslaved African Americans shared a "relational vision of health" that encompassed the entire community, the land, animals, and plants, and imbued all with spiritual power. According to this vision of health, many illnesses were spiritual crises manifested in the body (93). The starkest contrast with orthodox, "regular" medicine was that the enslaved and the healers among them recognized their own humanity and measured their health in terms of their well-being rather than their ability to labor.

Fett makes excellent use of sources including WPA interviews from 1920 to 1940; such physical artifacts as medicine bowls and conjure kits; and plantation letters, diaries, and reports. She does a particularly impressive job of supplementing WPA narratives with corresponding plantation records and diaries. Fett's work incorporates and contributes to a wide range of existing scholarship on the history of medicine, the Atlantic world, and the religious, cultural, and social dimensions of the African American slave community. Readers will surely want to add items from her bibliography to their own reading lists.

Fett explains the worldviews of the enslaved and slaveholders regarding the etiology and treatment of illness in the first half of the book. She begins by describing slaveholder definitions of slave "soundness" and the reaction to them by the enslaved. She argues that slave soundness included mental, moral, and physical health and was measured by their ability to work and perform their assigned roles. The enslaved rejected the "objectifying chattel principle" (193) but also "understood and attempted to exploit the concept of soundness to temper their utter vulnerability within the slave market" (32). Fett thereby lays the foundation for her main argument, that health care provided by slaveholders was organized around maintaining the market value of slave bodies while the healing practices of the enslaved were a resource for survival and resistance. Her central thesis is that enslaved African Americans' "relational vision of health held that collective relationships influenced an individual's well-being" (36). Fett draws from scholarship on African American religion to explain the "spiritually enlivened landscape" (199), that "enchanted universe" (36) or "pharmocosm" (39) in which plants, rivers, and animals held spiritual power to heal or harm. She briefly discusses the "line of essential difference" (44) that southern whites drew between their own body-spirit-mind beliefs and what they dismissed as "negro superstition." Here we see one example of Fett's many deft turns of phrase: "the idea of superstition thus operated as a racial currency that inflated the value of certain knowledge holders while devaluing others" (45). She then contrasts the relational view of healing with the distinction white orthodox medicine made between botanical medicines and "local herbal expertise." Although slaveholders and the white doctors who worked for them may have been men of faith, unlike the slaves they considered neither plants nor their own knowledge of healing to be sacred. Enslaved healers included nurses, midwives, doctors, and conjurers. The enslaved believed illness that could not be cured by home remedies or medical doctors was caused by conjuration. Individuals commonly sought conjurers to address disputes concerning sexuality, family, resources, or violation of community norms. By way of criticism, Fett's discussion of the demand for the conjurer's services reveals conflict and dissent internal to the enslaved community not reflected elsewhere in this work (91). That said, in my...