Of property and of patient: the medical lives and deaths of enslaved children before 1865
Date
2021
Authors
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Of Property and Of Patient: The Medical Lives and Deaths of Enslaved Children before 1865 examines the bodily experience of enslaved children as medical property in the nineteenth century. By denying enslaved children their bodily autonomy, as well as their bodily integrity, 19th-century American medical doctors such as J. Marion Sims, Crawford Long, John Neill, and James Moore contributed to the ongoing development of American medicine, especially pediatrics and anesthesiology. Due to anti-blackness in medicine, these doctors made them susceptible to becoming medical experiments. By investigating the medical lives of these enslaved children as experiments, one can understand how the liminal stage of childhood for black children became racially encrypted by medical doctors before 1865. ☐ This master’s thesis incorporates an interdisciplinary approach–geography, material culture, and archival theory—when focusing on four different historical case studies. All of my case studies come from the American Journal of Medical Sciences and the voices of formerly enslaved people in Works Progress Administration’s slave narratives and autobiographies. By combining these two source bases, I offer a robust perspective on the experimentation taken on enslaved children during bondage. ☐ Within two chapters, I argue that enslaved children and their bodies were conducive to the development of American medicine. Chapter one elucidates that the denial of posthumous bodily integrity for enslaved children provided a pedagogical base in medicine. Correspondingly, my second chapter demonstrates how doctors denied bodily autonomy to living enslaved children to augment their understanding of race, childhood, and medicine.
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Keywords
Experimentation, Case studies, Medical practices, Enslaved children