Doctors and Slaves Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables and figures
- Preface
- Acknowledgment
- 1 The disease environments and epidemiology
- 2 The medical profession
- 3 African and Afro-West Indian medicine
- 4 The Guinea surgeons
- 5 Slaves and plantations
- 6 Labor, diet, and punishment
- 7 Morbidity and mortality
- 8 The problem of reproduction
- 9 Smallpox and slavery
- 10 Slave hospitals
- 11 Plantation medical practice
- 12 Slavery and medicine
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Slaves and plantations
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables and figures
- Preface
- Acknowledgment
- 1 The disease environments and epidemiology
- 2 The medical profession
- 3 African and Afro-West Indian medicine
- 4 The Guinea surgeons
- 5 Slaves and plantations
- 6 Labor, diet, and punishment
- 7 Morbidity and mortality
- 8 The problem of reproduction
- 9 Smallpox and slavery
- 10 Slave hospitals
- 11 Plantation medical practice
- 12 Slavery and medicine
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Whatever property exists, or has ever existed in the Colonies, is the direct fruit of the labour of the slaves. That this labour has never received its due Compensation is matter of absolute certainty. Slaves still bear, and have always borne, a high price in the Colonies. Why is it that a man finds it worth his while to purchase a labourer? The answer plainly is, because his labour is worth more than the cost of the maintenance he is to receive. The price paid is a fair criterion of the amount of the wages which have been kept back, and of the loss sustained by the labourer.
Lord Goderich, 1831This is the first of two chapters concerned with the physical and social environments in which most of the Afro-West Indians lived during the slavery era. This chapter focuses on the sugar plantation and on how newly imported Africans were treated, how the slaves were clothed and housed, how they were assigned to labor groups and tasks, and how they were affected by the system of absentee proprietorship. Chapter 6 is concerned chiefly with the labor, diet, and punishment of slaves.
The sugar plantation
Caribbean plantation economies and societies were remarkable for their production of wealth and notorious for their treatment of slave laborers. “From the perspective of post-Roman European history,” writes Sidney W. Mintz, “the plantation was an absolutely unprecedented social, economic and political institution, and by no means simply an innovation in the organization of agriculture.”
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Doctors and SlavesA Medical and Demographic History of Slavery in the British West Indies, 1680–1834, pp. 127 - 147Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1985