16th Cambridge Wellcome Lecture

Department of History & Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge

11 February 2021

4-5:30pm (Cambridge, UK)

Dr Sasha Turner (Johns Hopkins University)

Doctors v. Midwives: Caribbean Medical Encounters in the Age of Pronatal Abolition

Measuring, experimenting on, and dissecting sick and dead black bodies, physicians, scientists, and naturalists claimed expertise to prove and document racial differences. Racial science bolstered slavery’s social order and white medical authority by scientifically rendering blacks as inferior to whites and therefore incapable of contributing much to society beyond brute labor. Uncovering the invention of racial science remains important to disrupting the tendency to ignore the bonds between medicine and slavery. And yet, how do we acknowledge the debt modern medicine owes to Africans and their descendants when the archive from which we are to produce knowledge of such debt was designed in exclusionary terms? How do we reconnect medicine to transformative transatlantic social and cultural interactions when it untethers itself from the quotidian? This methodological reflection explores how we might approach non-traditional medical history sources, specifically plantation slavery and abolitionist records, to reveal how politics and culture shaped medicine. It examines how the debates to end the slave trade and the interaction between enslaved midwives and learned, expatriate physicians influenced medical practice, ideas, and regulation.

Please register to receive the Zoom link for the lecture.

Organised by Leah Astbury and Carolin Schmitz.

The lecture is supported by Wellcome.

All welcome. The Zoom will be open for informal discussion from 3.45-4pm and 5.30-6pm.