Manuel Barcia Paz. The Yellow Demon of Fever. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. 296 pp. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-300-21585-4.
Reviewed by Lance Thurner (Rutgers University)
Published on H-LatAm (April, 2021)
Commissioned by Casey M. Lurtz (Johns Hopkins University)
After Great Britain declared the slave trade illegal in 1807 and committed naval resources to suppressing transatlantic shipments, this nefarious commerce became riskier in ways both profitable and not. Embarking human cargo in Africa, crossing the turbulent sea, and making port in the Americas all ran the chance of financial ruin should the vessel be intercepted by a British cruiser, whose crew would liberate the captives and appropriate the ship and its contents. At the same time, suppression of the slave trade reduced volume, and the appetite for unpaid labor in the slave societies of the Western Hemisphere inspired no few gutsy entrepreneurs hoping for a windfall on the sellers’ market. Thus began the so-called illegal phase of the slave trade.
Manuel Barcia’s The Yellow Demon of Fever is an intricate dissection of the medical regimes of this last phase of transatlantic slavery. Risk stressed the market logic of chattel slavery, what Stephanie Smallwood describes in Saltwater Slavery as a “rationalized science of human deprivation.” Slave traders had long “prob[ed] the limits up to which it is possible to discipline the body without extinguishing the life within,” in order to maximize cargos and profits and to minimize expenses.[1] Yet during the era of the illegal slave trade, such calculations became both more tedious and less reliable. As the replacement cost of each human being rose, life-saving investments won a higher return, and as a consequence medical attention—even if ultimately ineffective or pernicious—became a core faculty of transatlantic slavers.
Barcia’s argument rests on the finding that the medical practitioners of the slave trade were not (for the most part) hacks and charlatans, as we might assume. Their nostrums were surely questionable and many came to the position through irregular means, but nonetheless these were earnest professionals who “had to improvise, to keep up with new discoveries and medical developments, to experiment, and to do it all following a trial and error method” (p. 3). Consequently, the epidemiological disaster areas created by human depravity—that is, the contact zones of the slave trade—served as testing grounds for novel medical advances in epidemiology and public health. Working from the perspective that these practitioners were integrated into transatlantic circulations of medical knowledge, Barcia argues that “the new dynamics associated with the illegal slave trade contributed to a momentous change in the medical cultures of the Atlantic world.”
The heart of The Yellow Demon of Fever probes in terrific (and terrifying) detail the medical understandings and measures that Europeans—both slave traders and anti-slave trade patrols—employed to mitigate and treat cholera, smallpox, yellow fever, dengue, dysentery, and other scourges. Chapter 1 describes the “hygienic challenge” of the slave trade as understood by participants and observers. Miasmic theory reigned, and thus traders assiduously monitored their environs for the “noxious effluvia,” poisonous winds, and “putrid exhalations” of bodies and the earth. In response, various measures of isolation, sanitation, and ventilation were “indistinctly implemented, oftentimes in parallel” in search of a working solution (p. 36). Nonetheless, the Middle Passage became only more lethal during the illegal slave trade. Chapter 2 follows outlaw traders as they journeyed from clandestine slave factories far upriver in West and Central Africa to secret depots in the Americas. Throughout, malnourished captives suffered longer waits, more cramped quarters, and dwindling rations as slavers increased capacity to offset risk. Anxious about the toll on their merchandise, slave traders invested in sizable medicine chests, and ships were repeatedly fumigated and scoured with vinegar, salt, and nitric acid. Such efforts, however, were largely in vain. Indeed, it seems these doctors were cognizant that their ameliorative gestures were feeble and pathetic compared to the inhuman and unnatural devil’s business that paid their wages.
British—and later American, French, and Portuguese—anti-slave trade patrols entered these same disease-ridden contact zones as they apprehended ships, raided slave factories, and commandeered barracks and markets. Most often, the conditions of the rescued slaves were horrifying, as starvation, dehydration, and filth multiplied morbidity. In chapter 3, Barcia argues that navy surgeons and doctors were members of the same transatlantic medical cultures as those working on the slavers, and thus followed the same miasmic premises to similar preventative measures. They did, however, place added emphasis on behavioral risk factors, predictably prescribing temperance and abstinence as the best prophylaxis. In chapter 4 we learn that particularly vexing were the challenges of where and how to transport, treat, and house redeemed slaves. Neighboring residents of the resettlement sites, such as remote St. Helena or Freetown, were quite aware of the abysmal health conditions aboard slave ships. Contagion was a terrifying prospect, one that legitimated strict regulatory regimes and the quarantining of freedmen and women. Of course, on the eve of the Scramble for Africa, not all was medical pragmatism; rather, the suppressors of the slave trade, “under the veil of alleged hygienic containment, used [health] regulations to hide their own embryonic expansionist colonial ambitions” (p. 29).
The final chapter elaborates the book’s most far-reaching claim: that the public health regimes of both the illicit slave trade and the anti-slave trade squadrons had resounding effects on Western medical science. In this regard, Barcia contributes handsomely to current scholarly effort to understand the ways in which science (especially medical science) contributed to and was produced through chattel slavery in the Americas.[2]. Barcia deftly traces the networks of communication and exchange through which healthcare practitioners codified their experience in the laboratory of the slave trade into medical publications and standards. The slave trade—an epidemiological calamity of genocidal proportions—was a boon to medical careers and inquiry.
Nonetheless, while this conclusion appeals to present academic interests, it is not for this that Yellow Demon of Fever deserves a permanent place in our libraries. Instead, what will inspire many readers to return to well-thumbed pages is Barcia’s painstaking and thorough social research. Historians of slavery will long reference and benefit from Barcia’s rich descriptions of the hygienic conditions of the slave trade and the medical standards, theories, and methods deployed by traders. Meanwhile, graduate students will learn essential skills by tracing how Barcia draws insight and brings life to the slave ships through such lifeless documents as manifests of medical supplies or records of impounded goods.
The one serious disappointment of Yellow Demon of Fever is that here, humans in bondage are almost exclusively the objects of medical knowledge and intervention. Unfortunately, Barcia is not able to provide us an understanding of the disease environments of the Middle Passage from the perspective of those suffering the worst of it. Considering the author’s otherwise excellent sleuth work and archival resourcefulness, this appears a matter of silences in the record. Nonetheless, we are left with many gnawing questions: What connections did enslaved Africans draw between the violence they endured and the constitutions of their bodies? How did they understand disease as an intrinsic aspect of the social death of enslavement? What practices might they have implemented (or wished they could implement) to assuage or resolve their ailments? What reverberances did this experience have in the reconstituted social worlds of enslaved Africans in the New World? Without answers to these questions, Barcia is unfortunately unable to provide a prehistory of Afro-Caribbean medical practice of the sort detailed by Pablo Gómez in Experiential Caribbean (2017). Perhaps that would simply be another book; however, without that perspective, Barcia’s examination is inherently incomplete and one-sided. And, as a consequence, we are right to be doubtful about just how well we understand the situation.
Notes
[1]. Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 35.
[2]. For instance, Londa Schiebinger, Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017).
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Citation:
Lance Thurner. Review of Barcia Paz, Manuel, The Yellow Demon of Fever.
H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews.
April, 2021.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55786
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