Ordering Medicines and Ordering People on Caribbean Plantations
This 1793 list of supplies ordered for Golden Grove estate, a plantation on the southeastern end of Jamaica, includes many imported medicines among other items found on a large-scale sugar estate: including hardware, tools, clothing, provisions (herring, beef, pork, butter), and gunpowder. That these medicines appear on this list reflects the prevalence of such items across the British West Indies, a pattern that shaped plantation medical practice and, ultimately, informed the ideas about inherent bodily difference that emerged from that region.[1] Looking more closely at the medicines enumerated prompts questions about the experiences and meanings of medicines and what they meant for notions of racial fixity in such contexts.
Imported medicines formed a substantial part of health care on an eighteenth-century plantation in the British West Indies despite the persistence of local sources of remedies. By the 1790s, Golden Grove had been receiving medicines from Plough Court pharmacy in London for decades, contributing to an exponential increase in medicine exports from England throughout the century.[2] As they were incorporated into plantation medical practice, these imported medicines offered an opportunity to test and often reify emergent ideas of inherent bodily difference (and labor capacity) based on skin color or freedom status.
“List of supplies wanted for Golden Grove Estate, 1793,” Vanneck-Arc/3C/1793/1, Taylor and Vanneck-Arcedeckne Papers, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London.
The extant records of Golden Grove in the Taylor and Vanneck-Arcedeckne Papers at the University of London (and available via microfilm) enable more fine-grained analysis of the political, economic, and social worlds in which these medicines were purchased, administered, and experienced. Already in 1765 close to 400 enslaved men, women, and children lived on the estate, which featured cane fields, sugar mills, animal pens, and a hospital (“Hott House”) like other large estates on the island. Mortality and morbidity remained high at Golden Grove due to age, injury, and sickness.[3] Factors such as overwork, chronic injury, malnourishment, disease, and child mortality made the idea of medicines enticing to enslavers as a strategy to maintain bound, laboring populations on their estates. So enticing, in fact, that even as prevalent ailments, such as fevers, fluxes, ulcerated limbs, and other labor-related injuries proved resistant to available medical interventions, enslavers stockpiled and administered them anyway.[4]
The list of supplies ordered makes that clear: Common purgatives, such as Glauber’s salts and cream of tartar appear in the largest quantities, 70 pounds weight and 14 pounds respectively, while pricier, more potent (and often more harmful) items, such as Peruvian bark, mercury, opium, and camphor were ordered in smaller quantities. These were used in typical plantation remedies such as dysentery powder and emetic mixtures.[5] Highly soluble, Glauber’s salts (sodium sulfate) was well-known for its medicinal properties, namely as a laxative or “good diuretic purge” as Robert James describes it.[6] The fourteen pounds of cream of tartar, a laxative, mild cathartic, and diuretic, would have produced at least 100 doses of purgative.[7] By contrast, Peruvian bark, a known febrifuge, would have been costlier than many of these purgatives, which might account for the relatively low quantity, 6 pounds, ordered despite its perceived efficacy in cases of fever. In total, thirty-five distinct medicinal substances spanning the range of animal, vegetable, mineral, and chemical categories are listed, suggesting varied and frequent use on the plantation for people across the spectrum of freedom and unfreedom.
Cover page from Dr. Collins’s Practical Rules for the Management and Medical Treatment of Negro Slaves, in the Sugar Colonies (London, 1803).
This list dates from 1793 during a time at the end of the eighteenth century when Caribbean planters were using racist medical claims and the promise of better living conditions to defend the institution of slavery amid calls to end the slave trade. Plantation manuals, a popular new genre of medical text, pointed to supposed differences in how Black and white bodies responded to certain conditions on the plantation (including common diseases and remedies) to justify arguments about differential capacities for labor (both field work and reproductive work), pain tolerance, and more. In this context, Black folk were believed to tolerate higher doses of purgatives for common plantation ailments like tapeworm or ulcers than white inhabitants of the islands. Though the writers of plantation manuals recommended imported European medicines for both Black and white populations, they advocated different doses and approaches for their application. For example, one such author wrote that a “powerful purge” of mercury and gamboge for tapeworm would “excite much nausea and vomiting in a white patient, but on the less irritable stomachs of negroes, it has no such effects.”[8] Seemingly empirical observations of medicine use endorsed a logic of overdosing and forced medication that eventually entered European medical canon where they provided evidence for theories of innate physiological differences.
These medicines also had significant physical and emotional consequences for those who received them. They could replicate the prevailing racialized and gendered power dynamics, instill fear, distort the senses, or cause pain. Their application was often an intimate act, which could also be a violent one. Surgical instruments listed on the document offer one example. Among the instruments are 6 pewter syringes likely used to inject mercury or lead into the penis for venereal disease (either gonorrhea or syphilis).[9] Other remedies could burn the throat, cause debilitating side effects, and harm a pregnancy. It seems simple to say that a particular salt or bark would have been used to treat a fever, parasite, or something else, but we also must consider the physicality and intimacy of these remedies; and ask who would had administered them, why, and to what cost.
Paperwork like this order from Golden Grove estate illustrates the ways that long-distance commerce and the persistent question of labor within imperial institutions reshaped expectations of the human body by the close of the eighteenth century. A routine inventory contains traces of racializing ideas and coerced bodily experiences; a human story beneath its more obvious commercial one. In this case, we can see that medicine use on sugar plantations, due to its urgency and ubiquity, could offer fodder to those drawing distinctions between individuals based on the ways they seemed to respond to environment, labor, disease, and medicine in the Atlantic world.
Zachary Dorner is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park and is the author of Merchants of Medicines: The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain’s Long Eighteenth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2020). Institutional Profile
[1] Vanneck-Arc/3C/1793/1, Taylor and Vanneck-Arcedeckne Papers, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London.
[2] Zachary Dorner, Merchants of Medicines: The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain’s Long Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 93-94.
[3] Richard B. Sheridan, “Simon Taylor, Sugar Tycoon of Jamaica, 1740-1813,” Agricultural History 45, no. 4 (1971): 285-96, 291-92; Betty Wood and T. R. Clayton, “Slave Birth, Death and Disease on Golden Grove Plantation, Jamaica, 1765-1810,” Slavery & Abolition 6, no. 2 (1985): 99-121, 100-103. For more details on Golden Grove, see the Legacies of British Slavery project.
[4] Rana Hogarth, Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Differences in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 156-157; Todd Savitt, Medicine and Slavery: The Diseases and Health Care of Blacks in Antebellum Virginia (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 33-34.
[5] [Dr. Collins], Practical Rules for the Management and Medical Treatment of Negro Slaves, in the Sugar Colonies (London, 1803), 466.
[6] Robert James, Pharmacopoeia Universalis: Or, A New Universal English Dispensatory (London, 1747), 605.
[7] William Lewis, The New Dispensatory, 6th ed. (London, 1799), 251.
[8] [Collins], Practical Rules, 397.
[9] [Collins], Practical Rules, 407.