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
8 - The problem of reproduction
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
If you are anxious to increase the population of your estate by the breeding of your negroes, as every man must now be, both from a better informed sense of his duty, and the extremely increased price of African negroes, you will bestow somewhat more attention to your women during their pregnancy, than they have usually received; for, to the ordinary diseases, to which they are at that time subject, equally as at any other, they have some peculiar to that state, which are superadded.
Dr. David Collins, 1803From our concern with morbidity and mortality in Chapter 7 we turn now to problems associated with slave reproduction. The diseases and disorders of infants and children and pregnant and lactating women are treated in greater depth, as are the pro-natal policies and practices of planters and the difficulty of reconciling these policies to an economy and society that had long regarded women as primarily work units rather than breeding units.
Patterns of reproduction
Despite the great natural fecundity of the African race, the female slaves in the British West Indies were less fertile than their sisters in Africa and North America. Both contemporary and modern writers have sought to explain the basic differences of slave demography in terms of the cultural and psychological shock of enslavement, the survival of African mating and child-rearing customs, pro- and anti-natalist policies of slaveholders, disease environments, conditions of labor and livelihood, and economic factors related to the Atlantic slave trade and plantation slavery.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Doctors and SlavesA Medical and Demographic History of Slavery in the British West Indies, 1680–1834, pp. 222 - 248Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1985