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

This slender volume is very much a book of two halves. On the one hand, it represents an insightful and deeply researched enquiry into the little-known and often surprising history of medical practice in Saint Domingue, eighteenth-century France’s most lucrative colony, emphasizing the challenges of adapting European ideas about health and healing to a tropical island thousands of miles distant from the colonizers’ homeland. On the other, it represents an attempt to mine a limited corpus of primary sources, all of which were produced by white settlers and visitors, for insights into the lives and labors of Saint Domingue’s enslaved population, particularly those of its members whose primary work responsibilities lay in the medical care of their fellow slaves—of free people of color, of animals, and, in at least a few instances, of white colonists.

Weaver’s initial aim in Medical Revolutionaries is to explore the nature of the medical marketplace which emerged in colonial Saint Domingue over the course of the eighteenth century, and she does a very good job thereof, presenting a vivid and detailed account of the many challenges which “life in the torrid zone” (10) posed for Europeans and Africans alike. In her most accomplished chapter, “European Medicine in the Torrid Zone,” she explores the ways in which long-standing European medical traditions, many dating back to the classical era and the ideas of Galen, collided with the realities of plantation life and labor in a tropical island. Weaver devotes particular and much-needed attention to the ways by which this colony—which on the eve of slave rebellion in 1791 was home to a planter class which had acquired astonishing wealth—provided itself with a cadre of European medical professionals who attended to the needs of planters and slaves, civilians and soldiers. By exploring the ways in which medical practitioners enmeshed themselves in webs of patronage which connected metropolitan France to the Saint Domingue colony, Weaver allows us to understand some of the mechanisms of colonial administration and to gain a transatlantic perspective on a particular type of elite medical practice and its struggle to apply its tenets to an environment radically different from that of the “Old World.” But, as Weaver makes clear, although a wealthy planter, a highly placed colonial official, or a commander of French troops stationed in the island might expect to receive medical treatment only from a properly trained and accredited European medical professional, the slaves, less affluent whites (petits blancs), and free people of color (gens de couleur libre), who together constituted the overwhelming majority of the population of pre-revolutionary Saint Domingue, were far more likely to gain medical assistance through the ministrations of an enslaved healer. The latter’s expertise might blend European and African medical knowledge, supplemented by a local herbal pharmacopoeia and the insights acquired from the healing traditions of the island’s indigenous population. Among these slave practitioners were hospitalieres and infirmieres, slave women whom planters employed as caregivers in plantation hospitals, as well as midwives and herbalists. Also among the ranks of the island’s medical community were mesmerists, who capitalized on metropolitan fascination with the practices popularised by Anton Mesmer in Paris in the 1780s, and kaperlatas, “the most dangerous element of the medical underworld” (113), slaves whose curative activities crossed the line between herbal medicine and what many black and white islanders thought of as sorcery.

Weaver’s analysis of the medical world of colonial Saint Domingue is fascinating, particularly in its discussion of mesmerism, a topic which has been explored in its European but not its colonial context, despite Mesmer’s claim that “the new republic [of Haiti] owed its independence to him” (98). Equally praiseworthy is her investigation into the lives of the hospitalieres and other female slaves who worked in a medical capacity. This attention gives these women a much-needed visibility and agency in a Saint Domingue/Haiti historiography which still focuses almost exclusively upon...