Introduction

While the plantation is a popular grounding for narrativizations of slavery, less attention is cast to the medicalized underbelly of the transatlantic slave trade. Swande’ Mustakeem warned in 2008 that the “complexities of ill health that was intensified within and throughout the trade” have been “particularly absent” in discourses on slavery. Such absences do not align with three points. First, that medical expertise occupied a central role in the trade's functioning. Second, that disease and illness constituted a prevailing fear among slaves. Lastly, that the definitions of health and sickness developed from the slave trade find unsettling commonality with current notions of health as the capacity to do work or to labor within specific economic arrangements. Despite a flurry of scholarly emphasis on slavery and health in the 1980s, Mustakeem contends that “comparatively little research has been conducted on the medical problems affecting enslaved people during the Middle Passage.” In response to this incomplete scholarly coverage, Mustakeem's approach attempts to fill the gap with new research and in turn “demonstrate that the often complicated relationship of African-descended people to western medical history began aboard slave ships.” We need not look far to assist in Mustakeem's objective. The chaotic and violent encounters between Western medical culture and the Black body—an encounter that remains mediated through structures of domination that find their origins in imperialism and the slave trade—are constantly rearticulated throughout the existing textual record on slavery. I focus here on the infamous trial of King v. Kimber (1792), in which a British slaving vessel captain was charged and acquitted of the murder of two enslaved girls, around 14 or 15 years old, one left unnamed and the other styled “Venus.” I begin by elaborating the trial as a departure point for exploring the broader circumstances of the slave trade and the medical practice conducted aboard slaving vessels. The trial will serve as a concrete, historical example of the complicated power dynamics among crews, surgeons and slaves while at sea prior to my general analysis of what this medical practice portended for reading the body. I argue that the two published accounts of the trial that emerged shortly after Kimber's acquittal constitute examples of late eighteenth-century medical or illness narratives that gesture to the medicalized gaze underwriting the slave trade.