Content area
Full Text
Hogarth Rana A., Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780–1840 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017), pp. xvii \(+\) 268, $27.95, paperback, ISBN: 9781469632872.
Historians have long been fascinated by enslavement and its impact on identity formation, race relations and structures of control within the Atlantic world. Examining the familiar theme, Medicalizing Blackness explores how ‘blackness’ was manipulated, objectified and criminalised within the sphere of medicine to propagate racist ideas and cement white hegemony within and outside of the medical profession. Though not a new area of scholarship, it does offer a refreshing perspective from a scholar whose first book establishes her as a new force in the area of Atlantic medical history.
Medicalizing Blackness is composed of six chapters broken into three sections. The first two sections examine the development of theories and medical literature surrounding two diseases with black associations, yellow fever and Cachexia Africana (or dirt-eating), and the third the growth of medical institutions for persons of African descent from 1780 to 1840. It surveys the Anglophone Caribbean (predominantly Barbados and Jamaica) and the United States, capturing the negotiation of ideas about blackness that occurred during a critical century within this region and among medical professionals.
The book illuminates the suffering of Afro-descended persons (enslaved and otherwise) in the anti-slavery period. Its strength is in its tracing (and debunking) of the period’s fallacious yet established connections between the black body and particular diseases. For instance, the concepts of...