Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations. By Sharla M. Fett. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. pp. xiii + 290. $39.95 (cloth), $18.95 (paper).

Sharla Fett merges the study of health and healing with the study of southern plantation culture in her book Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations. She challenges historians to stop positing such clear distinctions between the professional medical practices of white doctors and the folk superstitions of African American herbalists, conjurers, and nurses. Such a reconsideration results in a heightened respect for the ideological contexts and hierarchies of power that informed the ways in which white slaveholders and enslaved blacks experienced healing and understood health as a process of interracial interaction. Fett focuses intently on the pivotal role of enslaved women within the health cultures of plantations in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. She also enlarges and enhances the historian’s lens over the everyday religious lives of enslaved persons by using a vast array of sources in innovative and rewarding ways.

White slaveholders and enslaved African Americans, according to Fett, responded to the property principle on southern plantations by generating “two competing visions of health and healing” (16). First, white slaveholders merged current medical theories with political and economic necessity to form commodified black bodies and objectified African American health. Black bodies were the source of white wealth, and, consequently, white doctors and slaveholders came to judge the bodies of enslaved peoples on “soundness,” or the health of slaves in relation to their capacity to work. Enslaved women experienced the chattel principle differently than enslaved men because of the female’s dual capacity to produce and reproduce. Second, Fett uses the narratives of formerly enslaved persons to envision how enslaved men and women defied white interpretations of the property principle. The confines of the slave quarters of southern plantations allowed for the creation of “a culture of healing that was not organized around the market value of slave bodies [and that] provided a powerful resource for survival, resistance, and community building” (34).

Slave communities on southern plantations countered the concept of soundness, the commodification of black bodies, and the objectification of black health by exhibiting a relational vision of health that relied on collective relationships and individual wellbeing. Such a relational vision incorporated not only living kinship groups, but also relationships with deceased ancestors and spirits. Taking a prompt from Albert Raboteau, Fett therefore argues in Part One, “Visions of Health,” that slave doctoring was integral to the creation and maintenance of the “invisible institution of slave religion” (36). She then employs Theophus Smith’s notion of “pharmocosm” to describe the pervasive effects of healing and harming in slave communities, as well as the resultant development of a sacred culture that was always subject to transformation (39). Herbal medicine was an outgrowth of the battle for control over the health culture of southern plantations, and enslaved women stood at the center of this rather confusing world of cultural exchange. The practice of conjuring supplemented herbalism as a way for enslaved persons to relate to both white slaveholders and other members of slave communities.

Fett dedicates Part Two of her book to “Arenas of Conflict,” paying close attention to the controversial role of enslaved women doctors on southern plantations and within slave communities. Unlike conjurers, enslaved women often worked under the strict scrutiny of white doctors and within the confines of the slaveholders’ homes. They also incurred extra health care duties because of their roles as mothers, grandmothers, and neighbors to other enslaved persons. Here, Fett shifts her theoretical attention to the construction of gender as it related to the cultures of both whites and blacks on southern plantations. She also describes the healing arena as a place not only of trust and faith in the care of doctors and nurses, but also of distrust and suspicion. Enslaved African Americans distrusted the medicine and motivation of white doctors, while white slaveholders feared the potential for enslaved health care workers to harm white family members. Fett refers to James Scott’s ideas about the art of resistance when recounting the ways in which enslaved persons elicited the distrust of slaveholders. Feigned illness was an effective, but also dangerous way for enslaved people to resist the power of slaveholders and to gain a reprieve from the rigors of labor. Pregnant enslaved women were doubly susceptible to the suspicion of slaveholders who thought they might be “playing possum” in order to avoid work (185).

Historians of slavery in the American South will find Fett’s Working Cures a welcome addition to the study of power relations on southern plantations and the contribution of enslaved women to the health and healing of both blacks and whites. Historians of southern religion will value Fett’s attention to the role of herbalism and conjuring in the transcendence of enslaved persons beyond the material worth of bodies, since “spiritual empowerment … remained the crux of enslaved healers’ authority, for it lay beyond the ownership and control of slaveholders” (196). And all historians will be impressed by Fett’s complex combination of sources which included plantation hospital records, medical journals, the personal papers and notes of slaveholders, archeological findings, and slave narratives. However, the impact of Christianity, though mentioned by Fett, remains largely unexplored. Fett also refers to the conjuring and herbal traditions of African religions in Cuba, Brazil, Haiti, and the Lower Mississippi Valley, but, again, she leaves these places and peoples to the expertise of other historians.

Michael Pasquier, Florida State University