Slave health on plantations in the United States
According to "Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Slavery," by Robert Fogel, the life expectancy in 1850 of a White person in the United States was forty; for a slave, it was thirty-six.
[1] European physicians in the West Indies frequently shared their knowledge of black-related diseases with North American colleagues.
[4] Historian Ulrich Bonnell Phillips found that slaves received the following standard, with little or no deviation: "a quart (1 liter) of cornmeal and half-pound (300 gm) of salt pork per day for each adult and proportionally for children, commuted or supplemented with sweet potatoes, field peas, syrup, rice, fruit, and 'garden sass' [vegetables]".
[2] Archaeological excavations have found evidence that the primary component of slaves' diet was meat from livestock such as pigs and cows, but that slaves also supplemented their diets by hunting wild species such as opossum, racoon, snapping turtle, deer, squirrel, duck, and rabbit, catching fish and oysters, and eating walnuts, grapes, blackberries, and hickory nuts.
[2] The masters only gave slaves pairs of "gator shoes" or "brogans" for footwear, and sometimes children and adults who were not working had to walk around barefoot.
Planters wishing to save money relied on their own self-taught skills and the help of their wives to address the health care needs of slaves.
[8] Some Black people developed or retained from African heritage their own brand of care, complete with special remedies, medical practitioners, and rituals.
[10] The physicians believed that the slaves' bodies were biologically and physiologically different than those of Whites; therefore, they should have their own resource for medical attention and treatment.
[10] In some histories of the Antebellum South, like William Scarborough's Masters of the Big House (2006), slaveholders are depicted as going to great lengths to protect the health of their slaves.
[12][page needed] Dr. Merrill provides a detailed description of what he thought slave hospitals should be like in an 1853 article about plantation hygiene.
[13] Dr. J. Marion Sims set up, in his back yard in Montgomery, Alabama,the first hospital in the United States for black females, on whom he developed techniques and materials (silver suture) for gynecological surgery.
[10] Southern medical education's predisposition for use of black bodies to teach anatomy and be subjects of clinical experiments led to a major distrust of White physicians among slaves.
[15] Betsy, Anarcha, and Lucy survived multiple attempts to fix their condition, and although Sims was able to close the fistula, small perforations remained after healing, leakage continued, and often the sutures became infected.
[15] After the success of Anarcha, many White women came to Sims to have the procedure, yet none of them endured a single operation, noting the intense pain associated with the surgery.
[10] Infirmaries, like Sims', allowed physicians to be successful businessmen in the slavery-based Southern economy, but also to create professional reputations as clinical medical researchers.
