The Yellow Demon of Fever: Fighting Disease in the Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade by Manuel Barcia (review)

In his new book, Manuel Barcia contends that during the nineteenth century, slave traders, the Africans they enslaved, and people policing the transatlantic trade had a mutual enemy: disease. In Barcia’s telling, these groups of people formed an unlikely alliance of sorts as they “engaged in a common struggle” (8) against diseases on board slave ships and at points of embarkation and landing. The number and kinds of illnesses proliferated to such an extent that medical practitioners found themselves constantly overwhelmed by illnesses that refused to respond to treatments. As a result, Barcia argues, health practitioners across the Atlantic shared their knowledge with one another as they developed new medical practices to combat unrelenting disease. According to Barcia, the knowledge-sharing that emerged out of desperation contributed to “a momentous change in the medical cultures of the Atlantic world” (3).

Barcia notes that most scholarship on the medical history of the Atlantic tends to focus on the eighteenth century rather than on the nineteenth, and placing his narrative in the later period gives it the added complication of the transatlantic slave trade’s illegality. Citing the 1807 British act abolishing the transatlantic slave trade, Barcia consistently refers to the “illicit” and “illegal” post-1807 era, and particularly the period after 1820 when North Atlantic authorities began to aggressively seek out slave ships. Yet Brazil, which forms a core part of Barcia’s study, did not outlaw the slave trade until mid-century, so readers may be confused by the broad characterization of the trade as “illegal.” Nevertheless, as British (and later French and American) naval patrollers set out to confront “illicit” slave traders they also risked their lives partly through the potential of violent resistance and mostly through exposure to debilitating diseases. When they captured vessels engaged in the slave trade, the captains and crews of these patrol ships were often aghast at the condition of the human cargo and constructed hospitals to treat African bodies ravaged by disease. Barcia’s focus on slave ships brings to mind Sowande’ Mustakeem’s work on the horrors of the transatlantic crossing.¹ But where Mustakeem’s work is viscerally evocative of the horrific conditions on board slave ships, Barcia focuses more on the helplessness of ship surgeons and other medical practitioners in the face of epidemic diseases. Medical supplies for treatment “were not always forthcoming, particularly in this illegal realm” (86), Barcia explains. Regardless, since treatments often involved a combination of bloodletting, purgatives, and sometimes herbal remedies, they were frequently ineffective at best and left practitioners searching for alternatives.

In Barcia’s telling, some of these alternatives came from Africans and people of African descent in North and South Atlantic colonies. It was this cooperative knowledge-sharing, he contends, that transformed Atlantic medicine during this period. If this is true—if African and African-descended people indeed proved willing and eager to share medical knowledge—it would represent a departure from earlier periods. Historians such as Susan Scott Parrish and Londa Schiebinger have argued that during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries African and Indigenous peoples in the Atlantic were wary of sharing their medicinal treatments with Europeans despite the eagerness of European practitioners to obtain them.² Parrish and Schiebinger describe a complicated cross-cultural medical complex, with some sharing of ideas, cures, and treatments, and other cases in which Indigenous and African-descended people closely safeguarded their practices. In other instances, as Júnia Ferreira Furtado has shown in Brazil, European medical practitioners sought medical knowledge from Indigenous and African healers but valued only the medicines while disregarding the related healing practices.³ For Barcia, the nineteenth century marked a period of change as he writes that non-Western health practitioners were “finally starting to be appreciated by their Western counterparts” (171). Nevertheless, as other...