Title: Sex, sickness, and slavery : illness in the antebellum South /
Authors: Weiner, Marli Frances, 1953-; Hough, Mazie.
Publisher: University of Illinois Press,
Year: 2012
Subjects: Disease; Social Conditions.; Sex Factors; Race Relations; Human Body; History, 19th Century; History of Medicine; Disease history; Diseases Social aspects Southern States History; Diseases Social aspects Southern States History Sources.; Medicine Practice Southern States History; Physicians Southern States History; Human body Social aspects Southern States History; Sex differences Social aspects Southern States History; Slavery Social aspects Southern States History; Race Social aspects Southern States History; Southeastern United States; Southern States Race relations History; Southern States Social conditions; Southeastern United States
Abstract: This study of medical treatment in the antebellum South argues that Southern physicians' scientific training and practice uniquely entitled them to formulate medical justification for the imbalanced racial hierarchies of the period. Challenged with both helping to preserve the slave system (by acknowledging and preserving clear distinctions of race and sex) and enhancing their own authority (with correct medical diagnoses and effective treatment), doctors sought to understand bodies that did not necessarily fit into neat dichotomies or agree with suggested treatments. Expertly drawing the dynamic tensions during this period in which Southern culture and the demands of slavery often trumped science, Weiner explores how doctors struggled with contradictions as medicine became a key arena for debate over the meanings of male and female, sick and well, black and white, North and South.
Contents: The political body -- Constructing race -- Constructing sex -- Placed bodies -- Ambiguous bodies -- The examined body -- The unexamined body -- The diseased body -- The body politic.