Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World by Londa Schiebinger (review)

For many scholars the eighteenth-century Caribbean represents a contentious space shaped by European colonization and Atlantic World slavery. For others it is a geographic space where cultures and knowledge collided. Londa Schiebinger’s latest book, Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World, combines these views and offers a new perspective: the eighteenth-century Caribbean as a site of medical innovation, experimentation, and knowledge production. She sees its indigenous and African inhabitants as skilled healers—experts on local plants and herbs—and stewards of highly sought-after medical knowledge. As Schiebinger notes early on in the text, “Fine educations in Europe could not guarantee success on the ground in the tropics” (p. 5). As such, European practitioners relied on enslaved healers’ knowledge or knowledge shared with them from indigenous sources. Her book then is devoted to exploring the transfer of knowledge from enslaved African practitioners to European physicians and the contentious relationships between these two groups set against a backdrop of Atlantic World slavery. Indeed, Schiebinger recounts how European physicians resorted to spying on enslaved healers to learn of their secret cures and running “trials” in which European treatments were pitted against local or indigenous ones to test their efficacy.

Her book is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 examines the experimental impulse in the eighteenth-century Caribbean. In this chapter, Schiebinger demonstrates how white physicians took advantage of their new surroundings and their exposure to black Africans in unfamiliar climates to explore questions about racial difference, the origin of black skin color, and the effect of climate and place on bodily temperature through experimentation. Chapter 2 traces how European practitioners gained access to African and indigenous American plant based therapies. Schiebinger balances cautious speculation with textual sources to outline the transfer of knowledge from indigenous sources to African ones, and African ones to European. African slaves not only practiced medicine, but adopted indigenous knowledge and adapted their own healing customs to treat ailments that proved too challenging for European physicians. She draws these points out in her discussion of yaws—a contagious, painful, disfiguring skin condition that left slaves unable to work.

Chapters 3 and 4 explore principles of medical ethics and medical experimentation as it was understood and practiced in the metropole and the colonies. Schiebinger carefully puts experimentation on enslaved populations in the broader context of experimentation that took place in Europe and in the colonies on the poor, prisoners, and other wards of the state. These groups, Schiebinger contends, were vulnerable to medical experimentation. Unlike slaves, however, they did not carry a value as property—a status that Schiebinger notes could shield slaves from reckless experimentation. That said, slaves faced having their humanity acknowledged and dismissed. When it suited a physician’s experimental aims, slaves’ bodies could be interchangeable with whites. In other cases, they were viewed as innately different, but close enough substitutes.

Chapter 4 stands out for its descriptions of exploitative experiments conducted on enslaved populations. Schiebinger examines John Quier’s dangerous experiments with smallpox inoculation that involved more than eight hundred slaves in Jamaica during the 1760s. This chapter clearly highlights the long and still understudied history of the medical subjugation of Africans and their descendants across the Americas. The fifth chapter rounds out the narrative by exploring the underlying tensions between white medical interventions and slaves’ use of spirituality in healing as was the case with obeah and vodou. European practitioners and colonial officials, Schiebinger notes, dismissed enslaved people’s healing practices as witchcraft or quackery. Some went as far as citing such practices as propagating rebellion (p. 128).

Schiebinger acknowledges that her narrative does “privilege European-style experimentation”—in both the sources used and the ways “experimentation is conceptualized” (p. 15), but she clearly gestures toward the limitations of such sources. The reader does...