By Theodore M. Brown, American Journal of Public Health, September 4, 2019
This special section marks an important but troubling anniversary in US history, the arrival in October 1619 of 20 unfree African laborers who were brought as indentured servants. By the 1660s indentured servants were displaced and numerically overwhelmed by African slaves, who over the next two centuries helped build the US economy through the institution of chattel slavery.
The six contributions to this section take on the challenge of making sense of the 400 years since October 1619 by exploring how slavery and its continuing legacies have shaped US medicine and public health, especially with regard to persisting racial biases and health disparities that show improvement over time but refuse to disappear. The authors of these contributions are a mix of outstanding older and younger scholars, mostly historians, who have probed the legacies of slavery at various critical moments up to the present. Their analyses are alert to the roles played by overt racial ideology and covert biases, first in providing a justification for slavery, second in rationalizing horrific conditions of labor, third in exploiting the power White physicians exercised over Black bodies, and finally in creating an intellectual framework of essential racial difference that had medical and health consequences that persist to this day.
Stephen Thomas and Erica Casper (p. 1346) notes that medical historians have documented how Southern physicians claimed that Blacks were medically different from Whites and required “special treatment,” thus providing the “facade of medical authority supporting the prevailing wisdom that people of African descent derived from a species other than human and as such could be justifiably used as ‘chattel’” (p. 1346). Alan Derickson (p. 1329) traces 20th-century practices of channeling Black workers into the “hot jobs” back to mid–19th-century physicians’ justifications of the exposure of slaves to long, brutal days in the hot summer sun because the negro was supposedly “organically constituted to be an agricultural laborer in tropical climates” (p. 1330). Deirdre Cooper Owens and Sharla Fett (p. 1342) show how medical professionals performed such functions as determining the market and insurance value of Black bodies and attending to the reproductive lives of enslaved women to maximize “birth yield.”
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