Inspection, Disease and the Medical Making of Slavery, 1500-1780

We are delighted to welcome Dr Hannah Murphy to our History Research Seminar series. Hannah will be joining us on Tuesday, 19 November, 4.15-5.30pm in The Diamond, workroom 3. She will be presenting a paper entitled 'Health, Disease, and the Medical Making of Slavery, 1500-1780'.

Hannah is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at King's College London. Her research focuses on the history of knowledge, science and medicine in early modern Europe, and early modern medical practitioners and practical structures of "race-making".

Abstract:

This paper examines the production of disease categories in the Transatlantic Slave Trade through a focus on the practice and process of medical ‘inspection’. Early travel accounts, eye-witness reporting, and abolitionist condemnations all testify to the ubiquity of the practice of inspection, in which a medical practitioner examined an imprisoned person to testify to their fitness. Such inspections took place in multiple sites and at different stages of enslavement. The complexity, scope and number of times an enslaved person passed through this process changed over the course of the early modern period, as the scope and scale of medical involvement and medical expertise changed too.

While it is tempting to see the increasingly codified practice of inspection as part a greater system of bureaucratization, abstraction and quantification, records of inspection reveal a far more intimate set of practices. Attending to inspection, and the idiosyncratic disease categories it created, reveals a form of medical expertise that was not predicated on curing, but on observing, identifying and classifying – quite literally making slavery itself.