The Editors
SEAN MOREY SMITH received his PhD from Rice University and is currently a long-term fellow in the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. His research has appeared in Slavery & Abolition and in an edited volume, Atlantic Environments and the American South (2020). He is currently revising a manuscript examining how medical theories shaped the politics, rhetoric, and policy recommendations of abolitionists in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglophone Atlantic World.
CHRISTOPHER D. E. WILLOUGHBY is the Molina Fellow in the History of Medicine & Allied Sciences at the Huntington Library and a Visiting Scholar in the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University. His research has been published in The Journal of Southern History, The New West Indian Guide, The Journal of the History Medicine and Allied Sciences, and the edited volume Charting the Plantation Landscape from Natchez to New Orleans (2021). He is also the author of Masters of Health: Racial Science and Slavery in American Medical Schools, which is forthcoming in Fall 2022 with the University of North Carolina Press.
The Authors
CHELSEA BERRY is assistant professor of history at Randolph College. She received her PhD from Georgetown University and was both a Richard S. Dunn Dissertation Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies and a Mellon Dissertation Research Fellow with the Council on Library and Information Services. Her current book project examines the relationships between poison, medicine, and sorcery in the Atlantic World.
DEIRDRE COOPER OWENS is a historian of medicine and slavery at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She is the Charles & Linda Wilson Professor in the History of Medicine and director of the Humanities in Medicine program. She is the author of Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology.
LAUREN DERBY is professor of Latin American history at UCLA and the author of The Dictator’s Seduction: Politics and the Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujillo, which won the Bolton-Johnson Prize from the Council on Latin American History, American Historical Association; was co-winner of the Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Award from the Caribbean Studies Association; and received honorable mention for the Bryce Wood Book Award from the Latin American Studies Association.
SHARLA M. FETT is professor of history at Occidental College in Los Angeles. She is the author of Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations and Recaptured Africans: Surviving Slave Ships, Detention, and Dislocation in the Final Years of the Slave Trade, the latter of which was a Frederick Douglass Book Prize finalist.
VANESSA NORTHINGTON GAMBLE is University Professor of Medical Humanities at The George Washington University. Throughout her career she has worked to promote equity and justice in medicine and public health. A physician, scholar, and activist, Dr. Gamble is an internationally recognized expert on the history of American medicine, racial and ethnic disparities in health and health care, public health ethics, and bioethics. She is the author of several widely acclaimed publications on the history of race and racism in American medicine and bioethics.
MARY E. HICKS is assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago. She has published articles in the Journal of Global Slavery and in Slavery & Abolition. Her forthcoming book is titled Captive Cosmopolitans: Black Mariners and the World of South Atlantic Slavery, 1721–1835.
RANA A. HOGARTH is associate professor of history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780–1840.
TIMOTHY JAMES LOCKLEY is professor of North American history at the University of Warwick, United Kingdom. He is the author of several books on class, race, and slavery in the American South. His most recent book is Military Medicine and the Making of Race: Life and Death in the West India Regiments, 1795–1874.
ELISE A. MITCHELL is the Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Princeton University. She recently completed her PhD in history at New York University. Her dissertation is entitled “Smallpox and Slavery: Morbidity, Medical Intervention, and Enslaved People’s Lives in the Greater Caribbean.”
LESLIE A. SCHWALM is professor of history and gender, women’s, and sexuality studies at the University of Iowa. She is the author of A Hard Fight for We: Women’s Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina; Emancipation’s Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest; and a forthcoming book on race, medicine, and the US Civil War.
BRANDI M. WATERS received her PhD from Yale University in the Departments of History and African American Studies. She is the Director of AP African American Studies at the College Board. Her research examines the intersections of slavery and legal medicine in Latin America with a focus on Colombia. Her work has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Tinker Foundation, and the Library Company of Philadelphia.
Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery 