This paper draws together several examples from across the Anglo-Atlantic world to consider the knowledge and work of enslaved nurses in the Barbados naval hospital at the end of the eighteenth century. These women provided physical care for injured and impaired sailors in addition to caregiving responsibilities in other aspects of their lives. Though their efforts were recorded by naval authorities, we have no record of the duties they performed in the hospital. Nevertheless, they are important to consider because of what they may suggest about the knowledge and business of care. How do those actions align, or not, with current understandings of the processes of knowledge production? What might the overlapping economies of care on the island of Barbados be able to tell us about the experiences of these women? It reminds me of Hortense Spillers’s observation that I paraphrase here: the enslaved experienced few distinctions among curative, intimate, or violent forms of touch.
I am using this paper to consider different ways of accessing the experiences and meanings of the care work of enslaved nurses. Examples of women using and adapting medical treatments in other contexts perhaps offers a way to think about what those enslaved women might have been doing in the hospital. In the face of male medical authorities who sought to marginalize women’s experience and erode the patient-practitioner relationship, we can still find examples of women using treatments in unexpected ways and telling physicians that they would no longer be using their medicines. Considering the enslaved nurses alongside plantation medical records and naval medicine manuals also offers a way to think about the multiple health spheres these women inhabited in a late eighteenth-century slave society that featured a variety of nascent institutions that we can classify as belonging to an emergent imperial care economy.