Slave medicine was a strange melange of medical dogma and superstition, pragmatic practice and compulsive conjecturing, insights and ignorance – all of which was aimed at the preservation and perpetuation of those lives in which planters had invested so heavily.

Nonetheless, all slaveholders did not employ physicians regularly, and some, particularly masters of marginal units, seldom, if ever, engaged their services either for slaves or for their own families no matter how grave the illness. Even on these numerous benighted outposts, however, the antebellum physician made regular bedside appearances if only by proxy. Sometimes he was present in the form of a cure laboriously jotted down, or vaguely recalled, obtained from a neighbor who had once consulted a doctor, or perhaps a remedy passed along in the family-materia medica which had become part of the public domain.

He was also frequently represented by one of a multitude of do-ityourself home medical guides authored by enterprising physicians which in themselves are a fascinating mixture of the erudite and the erroneous.