Sharla M. Fett, Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
In Working Cures, Sharla Fett considers the role of medicine on southern plantations during and after the abolition of American slavery. Fett investigates the competing black and white perceptions of health, as well as the practice of healing in slave communities. This study thus reveals the web of spirituality, power relations, and politics that underpinned both black and white medicine. Ultimately, Fett constructs medicine as an arena in which American slavery fully and clearly exploited African-Americans. Slaves became acutely aware of their commodification when slave health was sought after by both the African-American and white communities.
Fett’s study focuses on healing practices in coastal areas of the southeastern United States, where African-American and Anglo medicine had co-existed since the first African slaves were brought there. Much of Working Cures rests on the slaves’ relational view of health that linked individual well-being with the broader slave community, a tradition derived from West African worldviews that derived senses of self through kinship networks. Fett relies on Michael Gomez’s argument in Exchanging Our Country Marks that ethnic communities on plantations preserved African traditions. These traditions became mixed with Christian worldviews in the United States. Slave medicinal practices then offered a critique of pro-slavery Christianity and white medicine. Fett argues that the emergence of slave healing culture became a source of resistance, encouraging slaves to care for their bodies as more than commodities.
The spiritual and communal vision of African health held by enslaved people diverged from the goal of white medicine under slavery, which was to preserve the “soundness” of slaves. The physical and mental health of a slave throughout their lifetime determined their “soundness” in the eyes of masters and slave traders. This notion of well-being limited slave health to the preservation of a person’s “capacity to labor, reproduce, obey, and submit” (Fett, 20). White medicine neglected to treat slaves as more than commodities. This stark difference between the motivation of white and black healing practices props up Fett’s argument that African-American healing was often resistance. Ultimately, medicine served as the stage for a deeper debate over the value of human life and slaves’ humanity.
Fett’s work describes two competing perceptions of medical expertise. White southerners associated black and female healers with superstition. In turn, they elevated male doctors to the status of medical expert. In contrast, slave communities placed the ability to heal as more important than gender when assigning medical authority. In this framework, spirituality produced expertise. Thus, Working Cures is an important addition to studies of power relations and spirituality on the plantation.
Working Cures corrects an absence of scholarship in the historical debate over slave health and doctoring on plantations, which Fett asserts previously lacked a discussion about how slaves saw themselves as healers or patients. She draws on a variety of source materials to provide this missing perspective. In addition to the accounts of white southerners about plantation life, she uses antebellum slave and Depression era WPA narratives to hear the slave’s voice about healing on plantations. Much of her work is based on Todd Savitt’s Medicine and Slavery, which first articulated African-American healing practices as a form of independence.
The argument of both Savitt and Fett concerning slave healing as a form of independence and resistance is an example of what Walter Johnson identifies as the most common “way to frame an argument under the sign of ‘agency’” (Johnson, “On Agency” Journal of Social History 37:1 [2003]: 114.). Historians that attempt to demonstrate agency in slave communities often argue that slaves successfully worked to preserve their humanity. In contrast, Walter Johnson argues that such an approach is limiting because it is embedded in the gap between the historian and the slave’s present. He asserts that agency studies are attempts at restitution in which the historian writes as if he or she is far removed from the “nightmare of History” (Johnson, 121.) In light of this argument, Fett’s work can be read as a study of agency. However, Fett does not neglect the modern implications of white medicine on the plantation. She argues that the history of medical exploitation in African-American communities “reaches from enslavement to the present” (Fett, 1.) Johnson’s arguments about writing social history with the purpose of revealing slave agency, then, is useful for understanding the nuance of Fett’s research in Working Cures. In fact, her work would have been a useful example for Johnson to highlight the ways a historian could articulate arguments about agency with caution.