Sickness, Recovery, and Death Among the Enslaved and Free People of Santos, Brazil, 1860–1888

Between 1802 and 1849, cholera and influenza pandemics killed hundreds of thousands from Shanghai to Seville to New York, but these diseases did not dip below the South American portion of the equator.¹ As a result, Brazil gained a reputation of good health, an opinion confirmed by European travelers and some provincial authorities.² This rosy reputation wilted in 1849 when a yellow fever epidemic devastated several seaports, including the imperial capital of Rio de Janeiro. Following this outbreak, waves of epidemics swept the nation with unfamiliar and terrifying virulence. Brazilians were struck again and again by cholera, smallpox, yellow fever, and bubonic plague until the early 1900s.³

During the first three decades of worsening health, the Brazilian slave population dropped. Historians widely agree that the decline in slave numbers was a result of both the end of the international trade of enslaved Africans in 1850 and the general incapacity of Brazilian slaves to naturally replenish their population.⁴ In a claim that is popularly believed and argued by some scholars, the slave population did not expand in most parts of Brazil because slaves had to brave a relatively worse set of environmental and social risks.⁵ While few scholars have directly linked Brazil’s period of epidemics with slavery’s decline, the confluence of these events begs us to ask how slaves fared when Brazil’s health deteriorated. Were they not the hardest hit, thus accelerating their already diminishing numbers? In fact, historians do not know. Even more remarkable, we know very little about what made Brazilian slaves sick, what killed them, and how their health and health care differed from the free population.⁶

This essay argues that slaves and free people in the Township (município) of Santos both suffered from and were killed by the same maladies, with few exceptions. Slaves and free people appear to have shared many of the same environmental risks and access to publicly provided medical care, although causes of illness, amount of deaths, and levels of health care between subgroups of enslaved and free people (i.e., by age, sex, and place of birth) were vastly unequal. In other words, slavery had its own hierarchies like the larger society. Additionally, the occupation and status of owners impacted on the kinds of ailments that groups of slaves suffered. This article is one of the first to show that socio-economic inequalities were reflected in the health and mortality of Brazilians during the nineteenth century.

Regularly occurring (endemic) diseases killed most enslaved and free people, despite the enormous attention and anguish caused by irregular and extraordinary (epidemic) diseases. Yellow fever epidemics were one prominent exception to this rule since they affected the slave and free groups differently. Even in the case of this exceptional disease, genetic resistance or childhood exposure may have played a stronger role than differences in the day-to-day epidemiological environments of these two groups. Another great scourge of the time, cholera, also may have infected slaves and free people differently, but since the epidemics of 1855 and 1867 struck nearly every part of coastal Brazil except Santos and São Paulo, this disease does not appear in this study.⁷

In the mid-1800s, Santos was a modestly sized, coastal township with a port city that was connected to international trade, but it was not the nation’s commercial or political center. Slaves who lived there were similar to many other bondsmen who lived in Brazil and other seaboard slave towns that ringed the Atlantic rim at this time. The port of Santos is 200 miles southwest of Rio de Janeiro, the national capital, and 40 miles west of the city of São Paulo (Figure 1). It has been the primary port for the province since the seventeenth century and became Brazil’s busiest port in the twentieth century. In 1825, census takers counted approximately five thousand people within the township of Santos, and about half were enslaved. By 1872, the population of Santos had doubled, but the...