Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (review)

When William Postell published The Health of Slaves on Southern Plantations in 1951, he began with a patronizing graphic showing a sturdy slave cabin: at the front door, a white physician arrived to make a house call amid a burst of sunlight; at the back door, under a full moon, a black woman witch doctor arrived with her voodoo cures, clearly labeled "quackery." Fortunately, much has changed in the half-century since Postell's book appeared. Scholars have given serious attention to such complex historical subjects as the lives of enslaved Americans, the place of women as patients or caregivers, the cultural linkages between Africa and black America, and the ironies that occur when medical practice puts capitalism ahead of caregiving. Sharla Fett's interdisciplinary book takes full advantage of all these well-spun threads to weave a suggestive narrative on a vital subject.

Working Cures (part of a series on "Gender and American Culture") builds on the important work of Todd Savitt, Robert Farris Thompson, Leland Ferguson, and other scholars. Fett's well-researched monograph is arranged thematically and divided into two parts. The first section, "Visions of Health," explores the contrasting notions of slave health care held by white planters, mistresses, and physicians, on one hand, and a variety of black midwives, conjurers, and root doctors, on the other. White authorities, like modern company doctors, placed a high premium on maintaining productivity and diagnosing feigned illness; their measure of "soundness" was shaped by "the objectifying impulse of the chattel principle" (p. 193). Black herbal healers, in contrast, "recognized a close affinity between bodily and spiritual affliction" (p. 199) and between individual health and community well-being. The book's second part, "Arenas of Conflict," examines how these separate and competing worlds clashed in specific ways. Fett shows convincingly that "health was indeed a crucial matter. More than the absence of disease, health was an arena in which enslaved African Americans and antebellum planters struggled over religion, family, sexuality, and labor" (p. 199).

Anyone writing about life in the American gulag faces the dilemma of whether to emphasize the overwhelming hegemony of the oppressors or the striking resiliency of the oppressed. The first approach, taken to an extreme, reduces life to mere victimhood, where survivors become unwitting Sambos. The opposing stance, when exaggerated, glorifies agency and solidarity to an extent that can minimize the pain and divisiveness of perpetual enslavement, what historian Nell Painter has rightly called "soul murder."¹ Like most recent slavery scholars, Fett stresses agency, but she never loses sight of the stark context in which her practitioners employed their "communal store of motherwit, a blend of God-given wisdom, common sense, and the instruction of older women" (p. 196).

The author is particularly effective in exploring the ways in which slavery cast deep shadows of distrust across the most basic issues of care and nurture. How could white planters trust cooks and nurses with ties to conjurers and root doctors who could induce sickness as well as cure it? How could ailing workers trust owners who built plantation hospitals in part to centralize and extend "planter control over the care of enslaved patients" (p. 122)? In a chapter entitled "Danger and Distrust," Fett recounts how planters prescribed purgatives as punishment, allowed doctors to experiment on hapless workers, and violated African American funerary traditions by permitting the dissection of deceased slaves and the desecration of black corpses.

In the slave labor camps known as plantations, where human relations were so deeply and perversely distorted, issues of mental and emotional disorder must have been widespread. Fett might have given more attention to the issue of traumatic stress, which is only now becoming better understood. But her book is wide in scope, rich in research, and provocative in its argument. It will be suggestive to anyone willing...