It was evident from the very beginning of the colonization of the Americas that the West African had experienced a biological past which differed in significant ways from that of other peoples. For in that beginning, dead Indians began accumulating “in heaps, like bedbugs” as they succumbed to diseases that accompanied the Spanish Conquistadores and their animals from Iberia. But the black slaves who accompanied them as well, did not die, or rather, the Spaniards temporized, “if we did not hang a Negro, he would never die.” In addition to this immunologic hardiness, the black was physically sturdier. Common wisdom had it that he could do the work of four Indians.

In the nineteenth century, annual reports of European military medical authorities usually carried some such title as “The Health of the Army at Home and Abroad.” Though historians have recently studied the health of slaves in transit and the demographic patterns of slave populations in the New World, they have not paid much attention to these military data. For the West Indies they begin in 1803, for West Africa in 1810. After 1819, it is possible to trace the disease patterns of West Indian and West African populations in the last decades of the slave trade and on into the early twentieth century. These records help to show what happened epidemiologically to populations of African descent that crossed the Atlantic in both directions.

Lead contact and lead poisoning have received scant attention in discussions of early West Indian societies but are potentially important issues in considering the health and medical problems of blacks. Although our discussion focuses on Barbados, the West Indian historical literature strongly suggests that our general findings are applicable to other Caribbean areas and have implications for understanding some of the disabilities of early white populations as well. In this paper we also seek to illustrate how bioanthropological and chemical analyses of slave skeletal remains and historical data can complement one another in defining and investigating various dimensions of slave life.

Mortality rates in early childhood are widely regarded as a sensitive index of the health and living standards of a population (United Nations, 1973: 138-139; Williamson, 1981; Haines, 1985). The debate over the health and treatment of American slaves has led scholars to investigate various data and methods to construct these measures. Early work based on plantation records placed the infant mortality rate (the proportion of live births that die within one year of birth) at 152.6 per thousand (Postell, 1951: 158). Using census data and indirect techniques, estimates of the infant mortality rate climbed from 182.7 per thousand by Evans (1962: 212) to 274 to 302 per thousand by Farley (1970: 33) and 246 to 275 per thousand by Eblen (1972; 1974). Recent work based on height data and indirect techniques places the infant mortality rate in the neighborhood of 350 per thousand and total losses before the end of the first year (stillbirths plus infant deaths) at nearly 50% (Steckel, 1986a). Thus, measurements over the past four decades have gravitated toward the judgment of southern planter Thomas Afflick (1851: 435) who wrote, “Of those born, one half die under one year.”

On repeated occasions in the nineteenth century, Asian cholera irrupted from its traditional center in the great river basins of India and spread in pandemic waves throughout parts of Europe, North Africa, and North America. In Spain alone 600,000 deaths resulted from cholera during four great invasions (Cárdenas, 1971: 224). The United States experienced terrifying outbreaks beginning in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Rosenberg, 1962) which also touched parts of Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. Initially South America escaped the onslaught. Some Brazilians speculated that the intense heat of the equator, or the vast expanse of the Atlantic ocean, somehow offered an effective buffer to the southward spread of cholera (Rego, 1872: 84). But this “sweet illusion” was shattered in 1855. Indeed the first city in Brazil struck by Asian cholera was Belém, capital of the vast northern province of Pará located astride the equator at the mouth of the Amazon river.

Hypertension, or high blood pressure, affects nearly twice as many black Americans as white Americans, and with disproportionately more devastating effects. Black hypertension victims suffer kidney disease at up to eighteen times the rate of white victims, and have three to four times the fatal stroke rates (USPHS, 1980). Although no clear cause has surfaced for the overwhelming majority of hypertensive cases (Lancet, 1980; Gillum, 1979), there is mounting evidence that hypertension among blacks is related to sodium (salt) metabolism.

It has long been believed that “excess” salt consumption elevates blood pressure (Kark and Oyama, 1980: 1007-1020; Ruskin, 1956:xiii). Today it is known that a high intake of salt can result in excess sodium retention, which can influence blood plasma volume, cardiac output, vascular resistance, and blood pressure (Williams and Hopkins, 1979). Blacks, however, apparently do not consume any more salt than whites (Luft et al., 1977). But, significantly, it would seem that blacks do have a tendency to retain much more sodium “on the same salt load” than whites (Luft et al., 1977). Moreover, the volume of blood plasma in blacks may be higher than in whites (Schacter and Kuller, 1984).

The First article in this issue sketched out what has been done in the recent past on various biological aspects of the history of the black in Africa and in the Americas. The articles that followed revealed in splendid fashion the quality and sophistication of studies underway today. In concluding the issue, I could not resist the temptation to discuss briefly what sorts of themes and issues I hope will be pursued tomorrow.

Central to future bio-studies of the black will be the growing realization that after stripping away those husks of scholarly posturing and platitudes that in the past have pronounced Afro-Americans and Africans a “biological elite,” the kernel of truth remaining is that they were indeed such an elite, but not necessarily for the reasons offered. Those reasons generally have focused on the shock of capture, the long and deadly march to the sea, the squalor of the baracoons on the coast, the horrors of the middle passage, and the numbing, debilitating “seasoning” procedures on the plantations of the Americas. While there is no question that the whole of this represents a selection process of sorts, it was much too random to create an instant elite, as a bomb dropped on a city does not make an elite of the survivors.