Karol K. Weaver. Medical Revolutionaries: The Enslaved Healers of Eighteenth-Century Saint Domingue. Urbana University of Illinois Press, 2006.
Karol K. Weaver.
Medical Revolutionaries: The Enslaved Healers of Eighteenth-Century
Saint Domingue. Urbana University of Illinois Press, 2006. xii + 163 pp.
$50.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-252-03085-7;
$20.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-252-07321-2.
Reviewed by Katherine Arner (Johns Hopkins University)
Published on H-LatAm (October, 2012) Commissioned by Dennis R. Hidalgo
The history of medicine in the early modern Americas has
attracted a recent upsurge of scholarly attention. This trend reflects a
renewed interest in the Atlantic patterns of migration and settlement,
ecological encounters, and sociocultural transformations that shaped cultures
of medicine and natural knowledge in the New World. While such themes are not
entirely new, scholars are beginning to revise our picture of the agents
involved in those developments. They are moving away from narratives dominated
by the actions and experiences of Europeans, directing our gaze to a broader
spectrum of actors.[1] Among them, the roles of Africans and Africans in
diaspora--a fundamental element in Atlantic economies and societies--are
starting to receive greater and much-needed attention.[2]
Karol K. Weaver's _Medical Revolutionaries_ reflects this
important turn. Studies of the "pearl of the Caribbean" in the
medical world of the Torrid Zone have not been lost on historians. However
rich, such scholarship has centered primarily on French and French colonial
medical practices and professional structures.[3] Weaver's work complicates
this picture significantly by bringing to light the character and contributions
of enslaved healers in a colonial environment featuring an overwhelmingly
larger population of African and African creoles.
Weaver's central thesis is that enslaved healers must be
understood as "revolutionaries" in two ways. First, they contributed
to the formation of an Afro-Caribbean medical system, aspects of which informed
and, at times, challenged the "Western" medical ideas and
professional hierarchies imposed by European colonists. Second, enslaved
healers actually participated in acts of rebellion and "laid the
foundation" for the Haitian Revolution (p. 130). Weaver's study is thus
not only about the power of the enslaved to preserve African beliefs and
practices and adapt them to the Caribbean colonial context, but also just as
much about medicine as a source of power and space where slaves and Europeans
acted out political contests.
Weaver begins by describing the ecological and
socioeconomic landscape of colonial St. Domingue in chapter 1. Critical context
for her analysis of the island's medical world, this chapter provides a
snapshot of the geography, society, and economy of the island (including its
dependence on slavery), together with an overview of the colony's racial
system. She also presents a vivid account of the many challenges "life in
the Torrid Zone" posed for the health and perceptions of health among
European colonists, African slaves, and creoles (p. 10).
Chapter 2 examines the European medical professionals who
attended the planters, civilians, and soldiers on the island. More than a mere
overview of European medical beliefs and administration, this chapter
highlights the conditions that actually created niches for enslaved healers.
Weaver stresses the fact that environs and diseases distinct from the "Old
World" and unique to the "pathological system of slavery"
challenged European medical practices and beliefs (p. 40).
Laws intended to regulate the medical marketplace were
not always enforced. While one might assume that wealthy planters or highly
placed officials might have preferred medical treatment from accredited
European practitioners, this was less the case for slaves, less affluent
whites, and free people of color (who made up the majority of the island
population). Nor were physicians always available to tend to slaves on the
plantation. Hence, European and non-European laymen, laywomen, and
practitioners did not confine their options to the European medical
establishment.
Weaver turns to the medical practice of the enslaved in
the remaining chapters. Broken up into thematic units, the chapters deal
successively with plantation hospital staff, midwives, herbalists, animal
caretakers, and _kaperlatas_. Weaver brings to life the activities of each of
these healers, emphasizing throughout their abilities to both preserve and
creatively adapt African medical practices and beliefs to a new and oppressive
environment. The organization of these chapters also reflects the author's
interest in displaying the varied degrees of agency and power that medical work
and knowledge afforded slaves. This ranged from minor acts of
"occupational sabotage" to all-out political acts of revolt.
We learn in chapter 3, for example, that the
_hospitali_è_re_, _infirmi_è_re _(hospital caretakers), and midwife--all female
practitioners confined to the plantation--were each in a position to shape the
functioning of the plantation economy. Management of slave bodies, reproductive
health, and the distribution of medicines presented such actors with opportunities,
however small, to commit acts ranging from lying about sickness (to keep slaves
from working) to performing abortions. Such medical work also gave slaves a
degree of cultural authority, and Weaver sees this expressed in Europeans'
vacillation between prizing and denouncing these enslaved
practitioners and their contribution to plantation medical regimes.
Weaver traces a similar phenomenon in European
interactions with enslaved herbalists. In chapter 4, she argues that European
colonists actively sought out African and African-creole knowledge about
medicinals. Simultaneously, though, they nervously eyed that knowledge and
those practices. As much as that skill invested slaves with the ability to
heal, it also presented them with the opportunity to harm through poisoning.
In chapters 5 through 7, Weaver carries this argument
about power much further, connecting enslaved healers more directly to the
events leading up into the Haitian Revolution. Chapter 5 relates the history of
_gardien de bêtes_ (animal caretakers) and _pacotilleurs_ (veterinary medicine
peddlers), positions frequently occupied by slaves due to their perceived close
relationship to animals. Charged as they were with the care of precious
livestock (sometimes humans), they contributed to the vitality of the
plantation economy. Weaver also argues that such positions presented slaves
with greater opportunities for flight and travel between plantations. And she
sees this as the crucial backdrop for understanding the events surrounding the
role of the slave (and _gardien de bête_) Makandal and networks of
_pacotilleurs_ in one of the first legendary plots against St.
Domingue planters--a plot that involved extensive
poisoning of valued livestock, slaves, and also colonists.
Chapter 6 examines slaves' encounters with mesmerism, an
anti-orthodox medical practice imported from France into St. Domingue on the
eve of the French Revolution. Weaver argues that a practice already associated
with rebellion against medical orthodoxy acquired yet another set of political
meanings in St. Domingue. There, she argues, slaves appropriated the practice
as a source of freedom from the authority of the white population, while white
residents interpreted that development as a danger to social and political
hierarchy.
Of all of the healers, colonial authorities saw
_kaperlatas_ as "the most dangerous element of the medical underworld of
eighteenth-century Saint Domingue" (p. 113)_. Kaperlatas_, according to
chapter 7, healed by divination, amulets, and herbal remedies, and they were
sought out by a variety of social sectors (but particularly slaves). Here,
Weaver emphasizes the impact of cultural misunderstandings on the political
meanings that Europeans assigned to such practitioners. French colonists
perceived these practices as sorcery and potentially destructive influences in
the midst of revolution.
Weaver concludes her analysis with a very brief
reflection on the legacy of this medical system and its political meanings in
present-day Haiti. This is the least developed segment of the book.
In the span of four pages, the author attempts to analyze
the "landscape of modern Haiti" against the backdrop of the
eighteenth century. She does so through a case study of the elderly healer
Frédéric Géromi, comparing him and linking him to the enslaved healers. She
presents his medical practices and itinerant work as a form of persistent
resistance to the imposition of "Western"
medicine, which now appears in the form of global
biomedical and public health interventions. Such a short piece and scant
references to sources, however, do little justice to the sizable body of
literature (primary and secondary) on the current medical environment and
political circumstances in Haiti. Weaver provides very little of the necessary
social, economic, and political context for understanding Géromi's work. Nor
does she take into consideration the more immediate events of the nineteenth
and early twentieth century that would have shaped both his world and the
legacy of the eighteenth century.
As a revision of the social history of medicine in
colonial St.
Domingue, this book lays important groundwork for the
study of medicine and natural knowledge on the island. Teachers and students
alike may also find Weaver's compact study a useful starting point for thinking
about how historians frame studies of medicine in the colonial Americas, in
particular plantation societies. That includes those invested in understanding
the forces and actors involved in the creation of colonial Caribbean medical
cultures. This book also deserves attention among those engaged in debates over
the variety of venues for resistance among slaves and other marginalized
figures in St. Domingue and other Caribbean societies.
Women's studies and gender historians will appreciate
Weaver's investigation of _hospitali_è_res_, midwives, and other female slaves
who performed medical work. Attention to such healers gives visibility and
agency not merely to the enslaved but also to enslaved women in particular. This
reinforces a theme that historians of both medicine and slavery have developed
in the past decade. Scholars ranging from Londa Schiebinger to Bernard Moitt
have highlighted the place women (enslaved and free) occupied in the sphere of
healing and medicinal knowledge production. Weaver builds on this for her own
study by demonstrating how enslaved women, through their close relationship to
different forms of healing, could transform medicine into one of the few arenas
in which they could access and exercise varying degrees of power.[4]
Weaver's approach toward colonist-authored sources also
deserves merit. In lieu of slaves' firsthand accounts of their medicine and
interactions with colonist healers, Weaver reads colonist-authored sources for
evidence of where enslaved healers and knowledge fit in colonists' own medical
practice and perceptions of the medical world in which they operated. She also
makes use of these sources to reveal the cultural "misunderstandings"
and anxieties that characterized those encounters, pointing out that Europeans
could not always understand the practices and practitioners they were
observing. This forms part of her argument about Europeans' anxieties about the
distinctions between medicine and acts like sorcery or poisoning.
For all of its strengths, though, Weaver's analysis is
not without some major weaknesses. To begin with, Weaver frequently cites whole
treatises and books for different purposes more than once throughout her work
without any reference to particular pages. At times, claims appear without
reference to any source. This is the case, for example, in chapter 4, in her
discussion of Europeans' preference for enslaved healers' treatment of venereal
diseases and her claim that "slaves also understood how to deal effectively
with horrible febrile disorders" (pp. 68-69). As a result, a number of
Weaver's arguments come across as resting on vague evidence, even speculation.
Despite some of the strengths in her approach toward
colonist-authored medical treatises and topographies, this genre tends to
dominate her source base. In light of her call for sensitivity to the
"prejudices" and limitations of such texts, Weaver's use of these
sources appears surprisingly liberal (p. 7).
She draws heavily on the published treatises of such
writers as the high-ranked physician Jean-Baptiste-René Pouppée-Desportes and
lawyer/chronicler Moreau de Saint-Méry for things ranging from European
conceptions of disease and perceptions of slaves to the views of planters and
the experiences and motives of the enslaved.
These published sources can only provide so much
information about enslaved healers' actions and motives. They are, furthermore,
only one layer in European perceptions and activities on the ground.
Deeper digging into archival material, including a larger
body of legal and court records, correspondence, or a greater diversity of
plantation records (and representative plantations), would have lent to a much
richer and more nuanced picture of enslaved healers' place in St. Dominguan society.
Weaver's characterization of medical cosmologies is also
problematic at times. She tends implicitly to assume a generalized and static
image of African medical culture. As scholars have shown for St.
Domingue, other contexts in the Americas, and Africa,
however, slaves came from different societies with a variety of cultural
practices--including medicine and religion. Weaver, in contrast, makes little
reference to the provenance of slaves in St. Domingue, which is critical to
understanding the components that contributed to the Afro-Caribbean medical
system that she wants to recover. Not infrequently, she also projects
present-day medical systems and pharmacologies onto this specific colonial
context in the eighteenth century, using, for example, works on vaguely defined
"indigenous"
theories of disease and even a 1987 dictionary of plants
to describe African and African-creole uses of herbs in St. Domingue (p. 66).
In a somewhat confusing twist in the very end, Weaver frames the story of
medical culture and its political meaning as one of "traditional"
medicine triumphing over "Western" medicine
(pp. 129-130). The reader is left to wonder how the syncretic character of a
medical culture derived from a variety of international and local influences (and
diachronic change) could suddenly be reduced to such a dichotomy.
While Weaver is right to suggest a broader concept of
healing and its relationship to forms of cultural and even political authority,
one wonders if she stretches that relationship a bit too far. Scholars on the
Haitian Revolution (of slave revolutions more generally) may question the role
that Weaver assigns enslaved healers and medicine to both the cause and
cultural legacies to these larger political upheavals. Weaver tries very hard
to make enslaved healers'
activities pivotal in the cause of political resistance
and, ultimately, the Haitian Revolution. She does so with little attention to
the context of other cultural forms, actors, and potential sources of political
resistance. How central would medicine and healing appear in the story of the
Haitian Revolution if actively measured against the role of other factors?
Moreover, even if figures like Makandal became important symbols of rebellion,
to what extent did the power of his actions really derive from his role as an
herbalist and animal caretaker in particular?
In spite of the problems it presents, Weaver's work is in
other respects admirable. This slim volume manages to touch on a wide range of
fascinating topics: creole medical cultures, the impact of slavery, the
relationship between medicine and power, gender, the legacy of colonial
medicine in contemporary Haiti, and even historical memory. The book is thus
worthy of attention for the important questions it raises and vistas it reveals
for studying medical cultures in a place shaped by Atlantic world events and
peoples.
Notes
[1]. For an overview of this development in the
historiography, see James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew, "Introduction: The
Far Side of the Ocean," in _Science and Empire in the Atlantic World_, ed.
James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew (New York: Routledge, 2008), 1-28.
[2]. Important examples include Londa Schiebinger,
_Plants and
Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World
_(Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2007); and Susan Scott Parrish,
_American
Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the British
Atlantic World _(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). For
some notable examples in the Caribbean context, see Juanita de Barros,
"'Setting things right': Medicine and Magic in British Guiana, 1803-1838,"
_Slavery and Abolition _25, no. 1 (2004): 28-50; and Juanita de Barros, Steven
Palmer, and David Wright, eds., _Health and Medicine in the Circum-Caribbean,
1800-1968 _(New York: Routledge, 2009). For the American plantation context,
see Sharla Fett, _Working
Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave
Plantations _(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); and Mary
Jenkins Schwartz, _Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum
South _(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006). The older historiography is
not without some important exceptions. See Richard Sheridan, _Doctors and
Slaves: A Medical and Demographic History of Slavery in the British West
Indies, 1680-1834 _(Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985); Michel Laguerre,
_Afro-Caribbean Folk Medicine _(South Hadley: Bergin and Garvey Publishers,
1987); and Robert Voeks, "African Medicine and Magic in the
Americas," _The Geographical Review _83, no. 1 (1993): 66-79.
[3]. James E. McClellan III, _Colonialism and Science:
St. Domingue and the Old Regime _(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1992); and James E. McClellan III and Francois Regourd, "The Colonial
Machine: French Science and Colonization in the Ancien
Regime,"
_Osiris _15 (2000): 31-50.
[4]. Historians interested in this facet of Weaver's work
are also encouraged to visit some of her other pieces in which she develops
this important theme. See, for example, Karol K. Weaver, "'She Crushed the
Child's Fragile Skull': Disease, Infanticide and Enslaved Women in
Eighteenth-Century Saint-Domingue," _French Colonial History
_5 (2004): 93-109.
Citation: Katherine Arner. Review of Weaver, Karol K.,
_Medical
Revolutionaries: The Enslaved Healers of
Eighteenth-Century Saint Domingue_. H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews. October, 2012.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.