Diseases, Slavery and Race in the late 18th Century French Empire

At the end of the eighteenth century, European colonial administrations were preoccupied by the state of their colonies. They worried that famine, war and disease threatened to decimate their populations. In most of the European possessions in the Caribbean, where the enslaved population was dominant, this concern was manifest, principally, as a fear that loss of life would dramatically diminish the workforce. This is the context in which a medical literature on how to preserve, cure and sustain enslaved people’s health spread across European colonial powers.

Jean Barthélémy Dazille’s (1738-1812) Observations sur les maladies des nègres, leurs causes, leurs traitements et les moyens de les prévenir, first published in 1776, was representative of this body of literature: it aimed at helping colonists, planters, and slave-ship officers to preserve enslaved people’s lives.[1] In Dazille’s case, sustaining the health of these people was crucial for the French kingdom’s wealth: “To search for the causes of the diseases that hit them […], to find the means to cure them, and to stop the frightening depopulation of the species, is to take care of what is useful to the colonists in particular, to the commerce of the nation in general, and to the prosperity of the State.”[2]

“Cultivation of coffee in the Isle of Bourbon”, Patu de Rosemont, early 19th century, watercolour. Musée national de l'Histoire de l'immigration, Palais de la Porte Dorée, Paris. © Wikimedia Commons, public domain. This watercolor is one of the oldest pictural representations of the Isle of Bourbon, where Dazille wrote his Observations. It is a part of a series of depictions of the island’s landscapes with a naturalistic style. The coffee plantation is represented here as a space of order and division of labour enclosed in a majestic landscape. Jean-Barthélémy Dazille’s text provides one of the many counterpoints to these idealized colonial images of slavery.  

Dazille’s work drew on his experience as a surgeon, physician and hospital inspector in several colonies of the French empire.[3] He started his medical training at the Royal Marine Hospital of Rochefort in 1755, in his late teens, and thus began a medical career that would take him across the French empire. In 1758, he embarked as a second-surgeon on a ship going to Canada. After France lost this colony to the United Kingdom, he was appointed surgeon-major on different expeditions to Calcutta, Ceylon and Cayenne. In 1766, he became surgeon-major of the Isle of France and Isle of Bourbon in the Indian Ocean. During this time, he wrote his Observations, before being sent, in 1777, to Saint-Domingue as a royal physician where he conducted an inspection of the island’s hospitals.[4]

In his Observations, Dazille argued that the enslaved population in the French colonies was subject to an abnormally high death rate that was unrelated to climatic conditions. This went against the dominant medical literature on the topic which held climatic differences and consequent difficulties of seasoning as the first causes of diseases. In contrast, Dazille stated that specific causes to “blacks” were responsible: “The death rate of negroes being about the same everywhere, in unhealthy countries and in healthy climates, […] one can only reasonably attribute this excessive death rate to causes that are peculiar to them in different climates”.[5] At the core of Dazille’s work was the idea that black people – he used the word “negroes” and “blacks” interchangeably – were subject to different diseases than “Europeans”, or that if they suffered the same diseases, they experienced them differently.

Among the several diseases identified to be specific to black people, the cases of diarrhea and dysentery were representative of Dazille’s methodology.[6] In the neo-Hippocratic framework of the end of the eighteenth century, the “physical causes” of the balance of humors were associated with the “moral causes”, largely defined by the ways of living, to explain the nature of diseases. In accounting for the “physical causes”, Dazille stated that “Negroes, whose humors are less inclined to inflammation than other men, are also more likely to have diarrhea and dysentery”.[7] He also explained that the fibres of black bodies were naturally drier than the bodies of “Europeans”.[8] In accounting for the “moral causes”, Dazille explained how the enslaved people’s habit of making great fires to heat their cabins at night was detrimental to the balance of the humours and hence bringing the disease about.

This case shows how, for Dazille, the racialized body of the enslaved was defined through its pathologies, and conversely. It was a dynamic definition where the two regimes of causes, “physical and moral”, accounted in the same way for the existence of diseases specific to the enslaved people. This definition of racial differences through the study of diseases was part of a larger endeavour of commodification of the enslaved people’s health. The recommendation to regulate the fires made in enslaved habitations, as mentioned by Dazille as “moral causes” of diseases, was one example of this endeavour. Part of the enslaved people’s medical knowledge about delivery and labour, these fires were actually important in “birth customs”.[9] Regulating them was thus also a way to dispossess the enslaved people of their medical knowledge and to put their health under the yoke of the colonial physician.     

Throughout his book, Dazille provided recipes for cheap remedies using local herbs, detailed small surgical operations, and included administration guidance about reforming the hospital systems and regulating the consumption of food and alcohol in the colonies.[10] Conscious of the reluctance of the colonial administration to spend money, he also recommended that each slave owner had a small hospital on his estate, arguing that its cost would be largely covered by the gains of preserving a healthy workforce.

Dazille’s book was reprinted in Paris in 1792, translated into Portuguese in 1801 and was discussed by other colonial surgeons and physicians mostly among the French and British empires.[11] Severe with the Parisian Société royale de médecine for relying on second-hand accounts and reports[12], he was equally critical of other physicians who wrote about diseases in the colonies, such as James Lind, Jaques-Joseph Gardanne or Jean-Baptise René Poupée-Desportes[13], without sharing his experience and his method. These quarrels, rather than illustrating a distinction between the colony and the metropole, seem to highlight their interactions and the underlying assumption by contributors to this imperial medical literature that the enslaved people’s health should be controlled.

Without being statistical in its form, Dazille’s account illustrated the “two ‘faces’ of political arithmetic” at the end of the eighteenth century. The first one “emphasized proportionate supplies of people as the basis of a state’s power” which was amplified by mercantilist thought within the French Kingdom. The second one “confined itself to local population characteristics with an eye to moral, bodily and material well-being”.[14] Dazille’s work participated in constructing a specific sub-population within the French empire, out of the enslaved people, based on a dynamic and pathological definition of their racial differences. Dazille’s endeavour was to sustain this sub-population through a process of commodification of its health which resulted in practical recommendations to improve enslaved people’s lives. This text is therefore an illustration of how, at the end of the eighteenth century, colonial physicians and surgeons, as they were trying to improve enslaved people’s lives, extended the scope of their imperial medical knowledge at the expense of the few remaining spaces of autonomy enslaved people kept about their health.

Maxime Guttin is a PhD researcher at the European University Institute (Florence) working on a project at the intersection of the history of medicine and the history of race. His thesis explores how scholars studied the brain to produce racial hierarchies and classifications from the late 18th century to the mid-19th in the French and British Empires. He is more largely interested in the relationships between anatomy, medicine, and the construction of  categories of race, gender, and animality in their European and colonial contexts. He can be reached out at: maxime.guttin@eui.eu  

 [1] Jean-Barthélémy Dazille, Observations Sur Les Maladies Des Negres : Leurs Causes, Leurs Traitemens et Les Moyens de Les Prévenir (Paris: Didot le Jeune, 1776).

[2] « Rechercher les causes des maladies qui les affectent, suivre ces maladies dans leur commencement, leur progrès, leur terminaison et en indiquant les moyens d’y remédier, former un résultat qui tende à arrêter le dépopulation effrayante de l’espèce, c’est s’occuper de ce qui est utile aux colons en particulier, au commerce de la nation en général, et à la prospérité de l’Etat. », Dazille, 3.

[3] « Dazille, Jean Bartélémy », COL E 112, 1776/1784, Secrétariat d’Etat à la Marine, ark:/61561/up424d05x5d. See also : Meghan Roberts, Teh Health of Enslaved Workers in Dazille’s Observations » Harvard Library Bulletin, https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37368748

[4] Karol K. Weaver, ‘The Enslaved Healers of Eighteenth-Century Saint Domingue’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 76, no. 3 (2002): 438.

[5] « La mortalité des nègres étant à peu près partout la même, dans les pays malsains comme dans les climats les plus salubres, dans ceux, en un mot, où les autres hommes vivent, pour ainsi dire, exempt des maladies, on ne peut raisonnablement rapporter cette mortalité excessive qu’à des causes qui leur sont particulières dans ces climats divers », Dazille, Observations Sur Les Maladies Des Negres : Leurs Causes, Leurs Traitemens et Les Moyens de Les Prévenir, 23.

[6] Among the other diseases said to be experienced differently by ‘black people’ : putrid fevers, venereal diseases, suppuration of the chest, gonorrhoea and pian.

[7] « Les Negres, dont les humeurs sont moins disposées à l’inflammation que chez les autres hommes, sont aussi plus susceptibles d’éprouver la diarrhée et la dyssenterie […] »Dazille, Observations Sur Les Maladies Des Negres : Leurs Causes, Leurs Traitemens et Les Moyens de Les Prévenir, 75.

[8] « La sécheresse et l’aridité naturelles des fibres des Negres […] », Dazille, 32.

[9] Sasha Turner, Contested Bodies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 25.

[10] Londa L. Schiebinger, Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2017), 123.

[11] Dazille, Jean Barthélemy, Observações sobre as enfermidades dos negros. Trad., Antônio José Vieira de Carvalho, Lisboa, Tipografia Arco do Cego, 1801.

[12] Jean-Barthélémy Dazille, Observations Sur Le Tétanos (Paris: Planche, 1788), 123.

[13] James Lind, An Essay on Diseases Incidental to Europeans in Hot Climates (London: T. Beckett & P.A. De Hondt, 1771); Jacques-Joseph Gardanne, Des maladies des créoles en Europe, avec la maniere de les traiter et des observations sur celles des gens de mer, & sur quelques autres plus fréquemment observées dans les climats chauds (Paris: Valade, 1784) ; Jean-Baptiste René Poupée-Desportes, Histoire Des Maladies de S. Domingue, vol. 1 (A Paris: Chez Lejay, 1770).

[14] Philip Kreager, ‘The Emergence of Population’, in Reproduction: Antiquity to the Present Day, Nick Hopwood, Rebecca Flemming and Lauren Kassell (Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 263.