ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Ability's Experts: Healers and the Assessment and Diagnosis of Enslaved Litigants in Colonial Lima and Buenos Aires

• In Event: Bodies, Values, Materiality: New Histories of Health and Illness in Early Modern Latin America

English Abstract

This paper considers eighteenth-century civil cases involving enslaved Africans in Lima and Buenos Aires as sites for articulating and negotiating ideas about bodies, health, disability, and fitness. Afforded permission to sue their owners in the Spanish Empire's courts, enslaved litigants navigated legal channels to gain what historian Michele McKinley describes as "fractional freedoms," incremental improvements in their circumstances such as permission to seek new owners, prevention of separation from kin, or the provision of medical care. Enslaved litigants petitioned for these gains by accusing owners of cruelty, neglect, or overwork; by claiming existing or resulting bodily injury, disease, or mental unwellness; and by invoking owners' obligations under Spanish law and in accordance with Catholic teachings about piety and charity. Central to their legal strategies was the act of drawing attention to their own bodies, describing them in vivid detail and asking that they be examined for evidence of the debilitating effects of slavery and mistreatment. To substantiate these claims, enslaved litigants petitioned to have physicians, surgeons, and other healers inspect them to make diagnoses of their suffering and debility. Looking comparatively at litigation in two urban centers of Spain's empire, this essay focuses on the central role that healers played as arbiters of enslaved bodily and mental fitness in its courts. Through an analysis of the certificados they created and entered into the legal record, it seeks to trace how they navigated, on the one hand, the emerging legal strategies and discourses of enslaved litigants regarding bodies, ability, and obligation, and on the other hand, the longstanding rhetoric and legal strategies of owners, who emphasized enslaved litigants' monetary value and capacity to labor. In doing so, this essay aims to identify and explain how healers' participation in the litigation of health and ability varied between these two slaveholding cities.

Author

• Adam Warren, University of Washington