ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

‘Designed for the Disordered Negroes’: Yaws Management Experiments in the Age of Abolition

• In Event: Problematising Colonial Instructions: The Global Context of Scientific and Medical Information, 1650-1850

English Abstract

During the era of British abolitionism, there was a proliferation of manuals offering instructions on plantation management. Such manuals sought to remedy the concerns of slave owners by offering them strategies for preserving the numbers of the enslaved despite the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. This paper examines an attempt by prominent abolitionists to implement the instructions of one such manual regarding the management of the disease yaws. After the capture of Berbice from the Dutch in 1803, plantations which had been in the hands of the Dutch colonial government were taken over by a commission of British supervisors known as the Berbice Commission, including the prominent abolitionists James Stephen, Zachary Macaulay, and William Wilberforce. The Commission wrote to their local manager recommending the instructions offered in a management manual written by Dr. David Collins. Collins offered precise details about the design and use of yaws hospitals, recommending them as places where yaws sufferers could be imprisoned in order to contain the disease and ensure they followed the advice of white doctors. The manager subsequently reported with great optimism that yaws hospitals had been erected on the Berbice estates, but a later report from a Methodist missionary indicates that enslaved people fiercely resisted the disciplinary function of these hospitals. This paper thus illustrates the tensions surrounding instructions for health management during the age of abolition, when the reforms of abolitionists and slave owners were often met with spirited resistance from the enslaved.

Author

• Katherine Paugh, Oxford University