Medical Revolutionaries: The Enslaved Healers of Eighteenth-Century Saint Domingue (review)

Saint Domingue (modern Haiti) was the most important and most intensely slave-based European colony in the eighteenth century. Disease and unhealthy conditions constrained its productivity, and French authorities invested significantly in medical personnel and infrastructures. Official colonial medicine has been well studied, and Karol Weaver summarizes this material in her first two chapters; commendably, she goes beyond official medicine to explore medical practice in slave communities.

Two arguments inform this study. The first, medical, argument is that Saint Domingue's slaves created an "Afro-Caribbean health care system" (p. 59), that these enslaved healers therefore rank with Pasteur and Semmelweis as medical revolutionaries (p. 1), and, further, that their successors—"marginalized medical practitioners" (p. 127)—are key to transforming Third World communities today. The second, political, thesis is that the enslaved healers of Saint Domingue "participated in acts of rebellion that laid the foundation for the Haitian Revolution" (p. 130). There is more to this claim, but how much the resistance by slave medical practitioners was responsible for the Haitian Revolution, or to what extent such acts are distinguishable from slave resistance in general, is not addressed.

Weaver is most successful in her chapter devoted to hospitalières, high-ranking slave women who tended plantation infirmaries. Hospitalières were essential to the day-to-day functioning of plantations. Slave midwives played similarly important roles. Weaver nicely shows the ambiguous position occupied by these women, simultaneously supporting and undermining the slave system.

The remaining chapters—concerning slave herbalists, animal caretakers, mesmerists, and healers known as kaperlata—are informative, but they are not wholly persuasive, primarily because everything is made to fit the political thesis. For example, Weaver sees animal caretakers (p. 97) as "crucial actors" in the Haitian Revolution. In particular, she examines the case of the legendary insurrectionist slave Makandal, who was dramatically executed in 1758: Makandal became a symbol of rebellion and freedom that colored race relations for decades—but did his power stem essentially from his role as an herbalist and animal caretaker?

Similar approaches shape chapters concerning "enslaved magnetists" (p. 107) and the kaperlata. European mesmerism deeply impacted Saint Domingue after 1784, but its crossover into slave communities is historiographically more problematic than is suggested here. Even if French officials were not simply projecting mesmerism onto voodoo practices, can we unequivocally assert the existence of a class of "enslaved magnetists" and claim that "the practice of mesmerism by slaves was a political act of revolution" (p. 112)? Weaver acknowledges that the kaperlata could be either slaves or free people of color, but rhetorically she makes them all enslaved healers. Her treatment raises questions about mulatto medical practice and the invisibility of gens de couleur in this account. The story of the Haitian Revolution and of medical practice in the colony is less black and white than is implied here.

Several assertions need more support. Given that Amerindians were essentially extinct, did slave medicine really incorporate indigenous Caribbean medical practices? Was it actually the case (p. 29) that "inoculation in the colony and in France [sic!] came from the use of the technique by enslaved men and women"? Similarly, Weaver's narrative contains many conditional statements; too often, matters are "likely," "might" have been, "seem," or are "not unreasonable to imagine" (p. 94).

This book is well researched and nicely illustrated, but citations are overwhelmingly to whole books and without page numbers. What is one to make of the reference (p. 96 n. 98) to nine books (without page numbers) to support the point that Toussaint-Louverture was once an herbalist?

Weaver's study is worth reading for the questions it raises and the vistas it reveals. It is a praiseworthy attempt to explore new and difficult territory, and her map will undoubtedly...