Indigenous Medical Ingenuity: The Role of Medicine in Practices of Enslaved Resistance in the Americas between the Seventeenth and Nineteenth Century

Research within the fields of the history of medicine, race, colonialism, and slavery.

I am proposing a project that seeks to examine the extent to which medicinal techniques and methods were used by enslaved peoples in the Americas within acts of resistance between the seventeenth and nineteenth century. The intention will be to illustrate how indigenous African knowledge of medicine and the body, translated into the Americas via the slave trade, equipped slaves with a unique tool to perform acts which resisted their positions of total subservience.

A close analysis within this area will contribute to a burgeoning literature in the topics of medicine and slavery through an important recognition of agency and resistance by enslaved peoples, who have often been treated as passive subjects in a colonial history. Not only this, but it will also engage and contribute to a wider lively literature which has, over recent decades,

sought to dismantle colonial narratives, read against the grain of traditional historical perspectives, and acknowledge past marginal peoples, such as slaves, as historical actors rather than passive figures. A project of this nature necessitates both broad chronological and geographical parameters due to the difficulty of attaining source material related to covert slave actions which often would not have been recorded, especially from an enslaved perspective.

Opening up the parameters in this way will grant an opportunity to draw on and find as much material related to this important topic as possible, enabling it to be viable for doctoral research.