'They are ultimately to feel the benefit of change': enslaved healthcare and amelioration in Trinidad and British Guiana, 1780-1834

Abstract

This thesis explores the everyday medical and healthcare experiences of enslaved individuals who lived and laboured in Trinidad and the colonies that became British Guiana. It focuses on the years 1780-1834, a period of important political change that included the abolition of the British transatlantic slave trade, amelioration, and British emancipation. Drawing on the reports of Crown officials called the protectors of slaves, this thesis uses the complaints of enslaved individuals to examine experiences of disease, chronic ill-health, reproductive issues, disability, and examples of self- and community-based care practices. These records provide scholars with a more intimate understanding of enslaved medical knowledge and of ubiquitous forms of healthcare that are not typically evident within British colonial archives. It also examines the relationship between violence, healthcare, and labour demands, demonstrating the inextricable connections between each. The first chapter of this thesis follows the life of a diseased enslaved man named King. Using different methodological frameworks, the chapter re-imagines King’s everyday experiences from his capture in West Africa, to enslaved life in Berbice. Chapter two analyses the complaints of disabled individuals and looks in more depth at dynamics of power on slave plantations, arguing that disabled enslaved individuals were simultaneously vulnerable and powerful. The third chapter considers the role of enslaved people in everyday forms of self- and community-care, including the preparation and application of common medicines and medical procedures; it argues that engagement in acts of medicine were not limited to those with medical training. The experiences of reproductive women are considered in the fourth and final chapter, comparing ameliorative legislation and pro-natalist policy with the issues raised by pregnant and post-partum enslaved women in their complaints. These varied records are relatively under-used in the existing historiography but are exceptionally useful for the telling of intimate socio-medical histories.