Sex, sickness, and slavery
Subtitle: illness in the antebellum South
By: Marli F. Weiner ; with editorial assistance by Mazie Hough
Contributors: Hough, Mazie
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Urbana
Language: eng
Number of pages: 267
ISBN-13: 9780252036996
Subjects: Physicians; Race relations; Human body; Diseases; Practice; Slavery; Sources; Race; Medicine; Social conditions; Sex differences; History
Description: 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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: The Political Body; title: Constructing Race; title: Constructing Sex; title: Placed Bodies; title: Ambiguous Bodies; title: The Examined Body; title: The Unexamined Body; title: The Diseased Body; title: Conclusion: The Body Politic.