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Susan L. Smith, Marli F. Weiner and Mazie Hough. Sex, Sickness, and Slavery: Illness in the Antebellum South; Gretchen Long. Doctoring Freedom: The Politics of African American Medical Care in Slavery and Emancipation., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 5, December 2013, Pages 1526–1527, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.5.1526
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Two recent books about medicine in the nineteenth-century United States provide clear evidence of why health issues have been, and still are, highly contested and deeply political. These very different studies of southern health and medicine provide black and white portraits of medical theory and practice in a slaveholding society and during the long, uneven process of African American emancipation. Sex, Sickness, and Slavery: Illness in the Antebellum South by the late Marli F. Weiner, with the assistance of Mazie Hough, shows how white doctors upheld the racial and gender hierarchies of the South. Doctoring Freedom: The Politics of African American Medical Care in Slavery and Emancipation by Gretchen Long examines how African American healers, physicians, and patients challenged racial hierarchies and white supremacy.
Sex, Sickness, and Slavery documents the ways that doctors used medical theory to justify slavery and the subordination of women. It focuses on a wealth of doctors' writings in southern medical journals in the antebellum era to examine how white doctors defined sickness and health in the bodies of white women and enslaved men and women. In contrast, Doctoring Freedom illustrates how African Americans organized health care provisions as part of their assertions of black rights from the mid-nineteenth century to the early 1900s. It draws on a wide range of sources, some mere fragments, to provide evidence of the links among African American medical care, freedom, and citizenship.
