Slavery's Medicine by Claire E. Gherini - 9780813952741

Slavery's MedicineIllness and Labor in the British Plantation Caribbean\nAuthor(s): Claire E. Gherini\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: University of Virginia Press, United States\nImprint: University of Virginia Press\nISBN-13: 9780813952741, 978-0813952741\nSynopsis\nHealthcare and hierarchy in Caribbean plantation slavery\n From their inception, British Caribbean sugar plantations generated wealth on the basis of nightmarish systems of labor exploitation, where illness was a constant of enslaved life. Then, in the second half of the eighteenth century, plantation owners tried to improve plantation slavery, targeting medicine and healing. But rather than improve rates of illness, they sought instead to make the work of medicine and care more economically predictable and efficient and to hurry the sick back to work. Healthcare became an arena for contests for power, as people struggled with one another over the terms of their work and how they recovered from illness. Slavery's Medicine .