Slaves and medicine: black perspectives

This chapter examines leprosy politics in the age of slavery reading the sources from a bottom-up perspective: that of the slaves. The chapter examines the slaves’ own belief systems about leprosy, including a spiritual perspective that radically differed from the European medical perspective. Slaves had their own healers and treatments for leprosy. The widespread belief in the role of taboo violations among the Afro-Surinamese combined with the slaves’ unwillingness to disclose details of their medical and spiritual views and practices to their European masters contributed to European ideas about the slaves’ presumed indifference and fatalism. The difference in perspectives on leprosy between African slaves and European masters contributed both to the development of the ‘Great Confinement’ policies (with an aim to countermand the perceived African fatalism and indifference) and to the undermining of these policies, since the slaves saw nothing to gain by observing or adhering to the policies.