Medicine, Race, and Slavery in the Transatlantic World, 1600–1850

As the title suggests, the provocation of this Supplement is simple: that the histories of medicine, transatlantic slavery, and race cannot, and should not, be viewed separately. Between 1440 and 1888 more than twelve million African people were forcibly trafficked across the Atlantic Ocean, enslaved in plantations, cities, and homes across the Americas, the Caribbean, and Europe.1 We are used to thinking about this as a ‘triangle’, in which the flows were raw materials and trafficked individuals, and the static points geographic sites.2 Imagine instead a triangle where the points are medicine, slavery, race. The analogy is imperfect, of course: professional expertise, historical phenomena, and conceptual fallacy are not schematic points on the same plane. But like the support structures of a triangle, they exist in a relational tension: remove any one and the edifice collapses. The essays in this Supplement trace the co-emergence of these historical developments, the conceptual space they map, and the practical connections between them— offering in pursuit a dense cross-hatching of ideas, practitioners, and enslaved individuals, crossing a wide geographical terrain, and traversing the chronological breadth of the long early modern. The articles do not cohere perfectly; they do not, even, always agree. Yet both individually and cumulatively, the contributions to this supplement reveal that a critical approach to the role of medicine offers a fresh narrative perspective to the histories of slavery, and a new understanding of the problems of race.