When Science Needed Slavery: The Development of Scientific Knowledge in the Caribbean and the Americas

Before the bacteriological revolution, doctors studied air and environment to understand the spread of disease.  Nineteenth-century European physicians used enslaved and native people’s bodies on Caribbean and American... [ view full abstract ]

Before the bacteriological revolution, doctors studied air and environment to understand the spread of disease.  Nineteenth-century European physicians used enslaved and native people’s bodies on Caribbean and American plantations to determine health in the region. While historians have examined how colonial officials used this data to substantiate racial differences, my paper examines how they relied on enslaved and colonized populations as a proxy in order to establish health and environmental conditions in the New World. 

British physicians believed in the value of observation and understood that publishing their findings contributed to scientific knowledge. One doctor claimed: “The Blood of the Negro’s [sic] is almost as black as their skin.”  While this observation contributed to a growing discourse about racial difference, it also served as part of a larger effort to understand the environment.  If the physician's report analyzed “black blood” as different from that of European blood, it also included commentary on plant species, soil quality, weather fluctuations, and the shape of springs.  British doctors wanted to understand whether the Caribbean environment would be suitable to white people and used black people’s bodies as a litmus test.   Hence, their study of black people resulted more from anxiety and fear of settling in the Caribbean than investment in racial taxonomy, and it underscores the unacknowledged labor black bodies performed in proving habitability in the New World.