Papers presented by Liana DeMarco since 2019
2023 Detroit, MI, United States
"Sick Time: Medicine, Management, and Slavery in Louisiana and Cuba, 1763-1868"
Liana DeMarco, Yale University
Abstract:
“Sick Time: Medicine, Management, and Slavery in Louisiana and Cuba, 1763-1868,” shows how modern, capitalist ideas of productivity became central to medicine under slavery. Drawing on nineteen archives across the U.S., Cuba, and Spain, I argue that productivity-thinking grew out of physicians’ perceptions of plantation management, which influenced how they treated enslaved patients, crafted a scientific basis for medicine, and conceived of themselves as professionals. Toward the end of the eighteenth century planters began using sophisticated technologies such as clock-time discipline, hierarchical divisions of labor, and multi-level accounting systems. With these tools they could precisely interpret how enslaved people’s health impacted production, often calculating each person’s “working days” versus their “sick days.” Seeing themselves as scientifically-informed capitalists, planters sought white, male, university-trained physicians to serve as consultants in the maintenance of enslaved bodies. These physicians came to believe that there was a rigorous intellectual foundation for medicine in slavery management. They used slave productivity to judge the efficacy of different therapies they developed for the plantation, one of which was what they called “sick time.” This was a temporary reprieve from work that was designed to get enslaved people back to work as soon as possible, even if those people had not actually healed. However, as physicians used plantation management to cast an air of scientific accuracy over their knowledge, enslaved people reconfigured their own medical practices to make themselves less visible and countable. I show how enslaved people used their health and healing practices to subvert plantation time discipline, while physicians became the preferred medical consultants for managers and remained so after emancipation.