Sex, Sickness, and Slavery

Sex, Sickness, and Slavery
Author :
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
Total Pages : 290
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780252094071
ISBN-13 : 0252094077
Rating : 4/5 (71 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Sex, Sickness, and Slavery by : Marli F. Weiner

Download or read book Sex, Sickness, and Slavery written by Marli F. Weiner and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2012-07-30 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marli F. Wiener skillfully integrates the history of medicine with social and intellectual history in this study of how race and sex complicated medical treatment in the antebellum South. Sex, Sickness, and Slavery argues that Southern physicians' scientific training and practice uniquely entitled them to formulate medical justification for the imbalanced racial hierarchies of the period. Challenged with both helping to preserve the slave system (by acknowledging and preserving clear distinctions of race and sex) and enhancing their own authority (with correct medical diagnoses and effective treatment), doctors sought to understand bodies that did not necessarily fit into neat dichotomies or agree with suggested treatments. Focusing on Southern states from Virginia to Alabama, Weiner examines medical and lay perspectives on the body through a range of sources, including medical journals, notes, diaries, daybooks, and letters. These personal and revealing sources show how physicians, medical students, and patients--both free whites and slaves--felt about vulnerability to disease and mental illnesses, how bodily differences between races and sexes were explained, and how emotions, common sense, working conditions, and climate were understood to have an effect on the body. Physicians' authority did not go uncontested, however. Weiner also describes the ways in which laypeople, both black and white, resisted medical authority, clearly refusing to cede explanatory power to doctors without measuring medical views against their own bodily experiences or personal beliefs. Expertly drawing the dynamic tensions during this period in which Southern culture and the demands of slavery often trumped science, Weiner explores how doctors struggled with contradictions as medicine became a key arena for debate over the meanings of male and female, sick and well, black and white, North and South.


Sex, Sickness, and Slavery Related Books

Sex, Sickness, and Slavery
Language: en
Pages: 290
Authors: Marli F. Weiner
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2012-07-30 - Publisher: University of Illinois Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Marli F. Wiener skillfully integrates the history of medicine with social and intellectual history in this study of how race and sex complicated medical treatme
Slavery at Sea
Language: en
Pages: 433
Authors: Sowande M Mustakeem
Categories: Social Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2016-11-01 - Publisher: University of Illinois Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Most times left solely within the confine of plantation narratives, slavery was far from a land-based phenomenon. This book reveals for the first time how it to
Mistresses and Slaves
Language: en
Pages: 332
Authors: Marli Frances Weiner
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 1997 - Publisher: University of Illinois Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Marli Weiner challenges much of the received wisdom on the domestic realm of the nineteenth-century southern plantation--a world in which white mistresses and f
Slavery and the Enlightenment in the British Atlantic, 1750-1807
Language: en
Pages: 367
Authors: Justin Roberts
Categories: Business & Economics
Type: BOOK - Published: 2013-07-08 - Publisher: Cambridge University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book focuses on how Enlightenment ideas shaped plantation management and slave work routines. It shows how work dictated slaves' experiences and influenced
Medical Apartheid
Language: en
Pages: 530
Authors: Harriet A. Washington
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2008-01-08 - Publisher: Vintage

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • The first full history of Black America’s shocking mistreatment as unwilling and unwitting experimental subjects