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“Experiment and Good Sense Must Direct You”: Managing Health and Sickness in the British Plantation Enlightenment, 1756-1815

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“Experiment and Good Sense Must Direct You”: Managing Health and Sickness in the British Plantation Enlightenment, 1756-1815 “Experiment and Good Sense Must Direct You”: Managing Health and Sickness in the British Plantation Enlightenment, 1756-1815. by Claire Gherini A dissertation submitted to the Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Baltimore, Maryland October 2016 © Claire Gherini All Rights Reserved ! Abstract Between the start of the Seven Years’ War in 1756 and the end of Napoleonic Wars in 1815 enslaved patients, plantation managerial staff, healing adepts, and military and urban practitioners in the Greater Caribbean (a region that encompassed the plantation societies of the Carolina Lowcountry and the Anglophone West Indies) exchanged medical know-how, therapeutic information, and patient narratives. In so doing they not only made what were previously ephemeral and elusive knowledges of illness and its cure in the Greater Caribbean more enduring, they transformed plantations in the region into vibrant yet coercive spaces of medical knowledge-making. This dissertation spotlights the role of military practitioners, urban physicians, plantation managerial staff, and enslaved healers and patients in generating new ideas about illness. Over the course of six decades, these groups forced a paradigm shift in ideas about illness from a classical humoral-model to the modern disease framework. Grappling with tropical fevers during the Seven Years’ War, regimental practitioners created intellectual scaffolding for thinking about fevers and disease in the tropics writ large. Their conclusions obtained both for the military rank and file and for plantation slaves, and also fundamentally transformed how healers throughout the region understood illness. Urban practitioners subsequently gathered observations from plantation managers and enslaved healers to recast illnesses common among plantation populations, such as locked-jaw, yaws, and dirt-eating, as distinctive disease entities. The immediate consequences of this intellectual work were regional: it expanded the interpretive chasm between European-trained “country practitioners” and their enslaved patients and increased conflicts over the interpretation over what had caused an enslaved person’s illness and what was needed to restore her to health. During the era of ""!! abolition, however, anti-slavery reformers in metropolitan Britain used the new explanations of plantation diseases to agitate for the reform of British Caribbean slavery. Diseases are not transparent reflections of the natural world; they are instead the product of local conflicts and epistemological struggles to differentiate an ailment from others like it, to determine how it came to be and what should be done to treat it, and to assign interpretive power to specific occupational or political groups who make these determinations. Taking as its point of departure the insight that diseases are preeminently cultural objects, each chapter in this dissertation excavates the development of disease categories that historical actors linked to enslaved plantation populations. It examines how urban practitioners carved out distinctive diseases from the welter of symptoms and signs that healing adepts, managerial staff, and enslaved patients conveyed. The intersection of the local political economy of slavery with enslaved patients’ resistance, this dissertation shows, profoundly shaped the development of different categories of disease in the Greater Caribbean during the period. Readers: Philip D. Morgan Mary E. Fissell Toby Ditz François Furstenberg Randall Packard ! """! Acknowledgements The advice of Philip Morgan and Mary Fissell at the start of this project was invaluable: from Phil, get started and stop being afraid to make mistakes, and from Mary, choose sources one enjoys thinking with and a topic one enjoys thinking about because both would be with me for longer than I could imagine. It is a pleasure to finally be able to acknowledge the people whose intellectual, emotional, and material support made it possible and pleasurable to return from dead-ends and ill-conceived departures. Phil’s talents as a historian and the breadth of his historical knowledge are legion, but most impressive was his unfailing encouragement and mentorship of an advisee who kept switching topics. For his unflagging support and willingness to extend himself on my behalf so that I could get the funding and institutional support I needed to finish, I am deeply grateful to Phil. For her commitment to keeping me on task, her insights as a historian of medicine, and her enthusiasm for the overall project I owe much gratitude to Mary. I would be happy to be half the historian, teacher, and mentor Mary is. Her influence is clear in the pages that follow. Toby Ditz generously read drafts of many of this dissertation’s chapters, diagnosed problems, and suggested workarounds. A number of other Hopkins faculty offered encouragement and advice along the way, in particular François Furstenberg, Richard Kagan, Ronald Walters, John Marshall and the late Harry Marks. For her unflagging assistance and patience, I thank Megan Zeller. "#!! During my time at UT Austin, Neil Kamil, Judy Coffin, Julie Hardwick, Jim Sidbury, Robert Olwell, and especially Carolyn Eastman taught me how to think. I am especially grateful for Carolyn’s support of me at UT and later for advise that I transfer to JHU. My UT cohort member Jessica Wolcott Luther is an inspiration as an activist and as a writer. I count myself lucky to have had her in my life since long before we became adults with real jobs. I met Andrew Lipman during my third year of graduate school. Our friendship did not begin until three years later when we met again in Providence. Drew was a lifeline. His enthusiasm for my ideas and the project allowed me to perceive its merits and helped me resurrect my own worth as a scholar. His phone calls never failed to pull me out of my darkest moods, his edits are excellent and generous, his dumb jokes and chirpy laugh always make me smile. The graduate student community at Hopkins and at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies made finishing the Ph.D. possible. For their camaraderie and support I am grateful to Ian Beamish, Gabriel Klehr, Alice Wiemers, Chris Stolarski, Will Brown, Lauren MacDonald, Stephanie Gamble, Katherine Arner, Molly Warsh, Amanda Herbert, Justin Roberts, Khalid Kurji, Nick Crawford, Katie Hemphill, Sara Damiano, Brenna Holland, Don Johnson, Rob Gamble, Katie Hindmarch-Watson, John Dixon, Sarah Rodriguez, Mairin Odle, Ben Breen, Craig Hollander, Noelani Arista, Michael Blakeman, Lindsey Van Tine, and Sean Trainor. David Schley was and continues to act as a combination sounding board, editor, and asker of tough questions, I owe him a special thanks. #!! I entered Hopkins as an early Americanist with Jonathan Gienapp, Stephanie Gamble, and Cole Jones. I could not have asked for a more patient and relentlessly cheerful person to teach me about the joys of archives and how to use them than Cole Jones. He dragged me to the Library of Congress and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, taught me how to work catalogues and probe archival librarians, and waited for the fake lunch whistle that never rang. Afterwards, in between discussions on tweed, bespoke clothing, and miniatures he endured my songs about the MARC train and asked me about my discoveries. Jonathan Gienapp consoled me, made me laugh, offered glosses on faculty’s comments, and gave much needed perspective on academia. My time at Hopkins as an early Americanist and as a scholar in her late twenties was greatly enriched by the presence of these three. Research for this project was supported by a Philadelphia Area Center for the History of Science, an American Philosophical Society research fellowship, a Gilder- Lehrman fellowship at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Library, a Tracey-Joyce Newspaper fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society, a Betty-Sams Christian short-term fellowship at the Virginia Historical Society, a Charles H. Watts Fellowship at the John Carter Brown Library, an Andrew W. Mellon short-term research fellowship at the Huntington, a J. Brien Key Award from the President’s Office at Johns Hopkins University, a Wing History research fellowship at the Maryland Historical Society, a William H. Hefland short-term fellowship at the Library Company of Philadelphia, a Charles Singleton Center research fellowship from Johns Hopkins University, a Harvard University History of the Atlantic World short-term research grant, a short-term research grant from the American Institute for the History of Pharmacy, #"!! and a year-long dissertation fellowship from the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. Librarians at the Philadelphia archives greatly enriched this project. Connie King’s unflagging enthusiasm for bibliography and LOC subject terms made research at the Library Company of Philadelphia a pleasure. Jim Greene, a scholar who is as generous with his time as he is knowledgeable of the history of print. At the McNeil Center I am particularly grateful for insights and suggestions from Daniel Richter, Roderick MacDonald, Michelle Craig, and Jess Rooney. I have also benefited from the observations provided by scholars I met at conferences, including Sara Gronim, Brett Rushforth, Matt Crawford, Kathleen Murphy, Chris Parsons, Sari Altuscher and Eric Otremba. The support of my family and friends gave meaning to pursuit of the Ph.D. Suzanne Peck, Andrea Cottner, Rebecca Stern, Laurie Hahn probably didn’t get the appeal but supported me nevertheless. To my godmother Claire Smrekar who first encouraged me to a Ph.D. and offered outside perspective on academia I owe my deep gratitude. Thank you especially as well to my Aunt Maggie and Uncle Tim MacDonald who provided me a second home in Pasadena, close to the Huntington, and to my cousins, Kelly, Michael and Erin for sharing them with me. To my best friend Darren Schmidt, I owe too much. His humor, patience, love cooking, and George care have made the whole process possible. My sister Laurel checked in to make sure I was eating, bathing, sleeping, dating the right people, and getting fresh air.
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