Call Diseases and illnesses in slavery - work and freedom in the Americas and the Caribbean

The dossier “Diseases and illnesses in slavery - work and freedom in the
Americas and the Caribbean” aims to bring together articles that analyze various aspects
related to the health of enslaved and freed people in different contexts. The results of
research on the subject have been published in recent decades, forming a field of study
that has been consolidating. Important works on the main illnesses that affected
enslaved people, Africans and their descendants, considering the intersectionalities of
gender, age group and origin, have deepened our knowledge of the living conditions of
those who were subjected to captivity. Research into medical thinking about Africans
and their descendants, as well as the role of enslaved patients in medical education and
knowledge, has also advanced in historiography. Likewise, the role of Africans and their
descendants as practitioners of the healing arts, such as healers, bleeders and midwives,
and their knowledge about substances that could cause illness and even death have been
the subject of research. Thus, this dossier seeks to promote analysis and debate focused
on the health and illness of the enslaved and freed population in the various contexts of
the Americas and the Caribbean in the 18th and 19th centuries. The aim is to encourage
the field of studies on the diseases and health of the enslaved population; to
problematize the constructions of slavery and freedom that were implicit, for example,
in the exercise of who cured and who was cured; to broaden this study by considering
different spaces, cities, regions and administrations; and to try to observe changes and
continuities, also considering a time when the American colonies underwent political
and administrative transformations.

ARAYA FUENTES, Tamara Alicia. Adoecer e se queixar: Escravidão e doença no
Santiago do Chile (1740-1823). Tese de doutorado apresentada ao Curso de Pós-
Graduação em História das Ciências e da Saúde da Casa de Oswaldo Cruz-Fiocruz,
2023
BARCIA, Manuel. The yellow demon of fever: fighting disease in the Nineteenth-
Century Transatlantic Slave Trade. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020.
CHALHOUB, Sidney. Cidade Febril: cortiços e epidemias na Corte imperial. São
Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1996. 
KARASCH, Mary. A vida dos escravos no Rio de Janeiro (1808-1850). São Paulo:
Companhia das Letras, 2000.

PIMENTA, Tânia; GOMES, Flávio; KODAMA, Kaori. Das enfermidades cativas: para
uma história da saúde e das doenças do Brasil escravista. In: TEIXEIRA, L.A.;
PIMENTA, T.S.; HOCHMAN, G.. História da Saúde no Brasil. São Paulo: Hucitec
Editora, 2018.
PIMENTA, Tânia e GOMES, Flávio (Orgs.). Escravidão, Doenças e Práticas de Cura
no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Outras Letras, 2016.
SAVITT, Todd. Medicine and Slavery: the diseases and health care of blacks in
Antebellum Virgínia. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981.
SHERIDAN, Richard. Doctors and slaves: a medical and demographic history of
slavery in the British West Indies, 1680-1834. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1985.