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  • The Prognosis of Bondage:Slavery, Health, and Medicine in the Civil War and Reconstruction Eras
  • Dea H. Boster (bio)
Jim Downs. Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. 280 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95.
Gretchen Long. Doctoring Freedom: The Politics of African American Medical Care in Slavery and Emancipation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. 248 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $37.50.
Marli F. Weiner with Mazie Hough. Sex, Sickness, and Slavery: Illness in the Antebellum South. Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2012. 288 pp. Notes and index. $60.00.

In January 1862, a slave named William Davis told a meeting of the American Missionary Society about an elderly man he knew who “had to recline upon a staff” prior to the Civil War, but on the day the man heard that he had become free, “he dropped his staff, and stretched and stretched himself until he got quite straight.”1 Abolitionists had used the loss of a crutch or cane as a metaphor for freedom for years, but during and after the Civil War, more and more descriptions began to circulate of crippled or weakened slaves who immediately threw off their crutches upon being emancipated, transforming into healthy, able-bodied individuals. The implicit message was that these individuals would become independent and useful laborers in the wake of the Civil War. The real power of this image, however, resided in the links between slavery, health, and disability; major components of both pro- and antislavery arguments in the mid-nineteenth century. New monographs from Marli F. Weiner, Jim Downs, and Gretchen Long show that, during the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction, illness, suffering, and medical practice continued to be intertwined closely with different understandings of the effects of bondage and the meaning of freedom for former slaves, but in unexpected and complex ways.

Marli F. Weiner’s Sex, Sickness, and Slavery analyzes the nebulous and [End Page 89] often contradictory medical discourse of the early nineteenth-century South to demonstrate “the power of the body in defining slavery” (p. 215). Weiner, who passed away in 2009, argues that white male doctors, mostly allopathic or “regular” practitioners, theorized “normal” standards of health for a distinctive Southern region, and “worked hard to develop plausible theories about race and sex that met the region’s ideological needs while remaining consistent with the biological truths they observed” (p. 8). These theories involved classifications of race, region, gender, and anatomy that were sometimes empirical, sometimes anecdotal, and certainly not static in the first half of the nineteenth century. Weiner places unique emphasis on the psychological dimensions of antebellum medical practice—the trust and emotional stability of patients, as well as refusals of treatment and the ever-present possibility of shamming—as well as the role of doctors in maintaining social order and racial hierarchy. However, the book’s most interesting intervention is Weiner’s argument that white Southern doctors used the growing cultural authority of medicine to justify not only the subordination of African American slaves, but also of white women, whose “ambiguous” reproductive bodies also required medical expertise and intervention. Her primary research emphasizes the medicalization of women’s sexuality, menstruation, and parturition, and indicates that doctors believed black women to be simultaneously healthier than and biologically inferior to white women, who fell victim to the ill effects of “civilization.” In this respect, white women’s experiences with medical authorities mirrored the experiences of slaves in interesting, and often surprising, ways. Weiner bases her argument primarily on published medical literature, including state and national medical journals and codes of ethics from developing professional societies, much of which has been analyzed by many other scholars before. However, Weiner also includes less conventional primary documents, such as amazing case studies of intersexed slaves and personal reflections of white Southern women about their bodies, pregnancy, and childbirth. Weiner also nods to slave perspectives and agency in medical decision making by noting briefly that slaves might resist white medical authorities or secretly seek their own practitioners, but her narrative is framed by the assumption that...

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