Medical Practitioners, The Archive, and the Making of Slavery in Early Modern Barbados

Abstract In seventeenth-century Barbados medical practitioners abounded, frequently operated as planters and merchants, and amassed sizeable estates. Their wills and property deeds attest to the efficacy of their professional ambitions and their important role in the formation of colonial Barbadian society. They also testify, unambiguously, to the frequency with which medical practitioners owned enslaved individuals, whose names were as prominent and more numerous in medical wills than were the names of wives, children, siblings, and friends. How should we consider this question of slave-ownership, and how does it fit into broader scholarship on the professionalization of medicine and its relationship to slavery and race? Mapping the wills and deeds of roughly 121 of these individuals, this paper examines the presence of medical practitioners in seventeenth-century Barbados, the practice of enslavement by these colonial medical men, and the archival relationship between these two historical phenomena.