Slavery and Disease: Medical Knowledge in the Atlantic World

Catalog description

This capstone course examines the various methods historians use to understand the economic, medical, environmental, and human costs associated with the Atlantic slave system from roughly the 1600s to the 1850s. Students will learn how slavery, settlement, and disease contributed to the development of Atlantic World societies in North America and the West Indies and reinforced the enduring concept of embodied racial differences. This latter concept in particular fueled Enlightenment Era knowledge production and the development of the medical profession in the Americas. In this course we focus on the close and often coerced contact between disparate groups of people—Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans. We will examine how interactions between these groups contributed to the development racialized disease, the social construction of disease, and the ways in which race became (erroneously) theorized as an aspect of biology). We will consider how perceptions of health and sickness in the disease environment of the Americas gave rise to enduring racial and gendered identities.