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9 - “I Know Nothing of this Disease”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 May 2011

Peter McCandless
Peter McCandless
Affiliation:
College of Charleston, South Carolina
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Summary

I have been greatly afflicted with nephritick pains and a stoppage of urine … and there is little help to be had from any of the doctors of this place in so critical a disease, the best of them having originally been no more than barbers.

Gideon Johnston, 1710

[A] blessed state of health which the inhabitants of this town have enjoyed for some years past and which I hope will continue until all the doctors in the place die of old age.

Henry Laurens, 1770

Mr. Deas has got rid of his fever, but poor William's will not yet take leave of him. I have just been administering a dose of James's Powders, and I hope by the aid of arsenic to cure him in a day or two.

Anne Deas, 1814

DOCTORS DIFFER

In the decades leading up to the Civil War, some doctors in the slave states advocated a distinctive southern medicine, or what they sometimes called “states-rights medicine.” They urged the creation of medical schools staffed by southern doctors, where students could learn to treat the distinctive diseases of the region and the “peculiarities” of black bodies and diseases. “Southern medicine” was more rhetorical than real, a reaction to the increase of sectional tension in the United States that produced secession. The healing arts as practiced in the southern states never differed hugely in practice from those in other parts of America or in the western world generally.

Type
Chapter
Information
Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry , pp. 168 - 187
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

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References

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Vogel, Virgil J., American Indian Medicine (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990; 1970), 370–374Google Scholar
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Adair, James, Adair's History of the American Indians, ed. by Samuel Cole Williams (New York: Promontory Press, 1930), 244–248, 364, 388Google Scholar
Lining, John, “Of the Antihelminthic Virtues of the Root of the Indian Pink,” Essays and Observations, Physical and Literary 1 (1754), 386–389Google Scholar
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Fett, Sharla M., Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 159–166Google Scholar
Clifton, James M., ed., Life and Labor on Argyle Island: Letters and Documents of a Savannah River Plantation, 1833–1867 (Savannah, GA: The Beehive Press, 1978)Google Scholar
Joyner, Charles, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 144–150Google Scholar

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