The Caribbean Slave: A Biological History

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Cambridge University Press, Jun 20, 2002 - History - 292 pages
This study focuses on the black biological experience in slavery, in the Caribbean. It begins with a consideration of the rapidly changing disease environment after the arrival of the Spaniards; it also looks at the slave ancestors in their West African homeland and examines the ways in which the nutritional and disease environments of that area had shaped its inhabitants. In a particularly innovative chapter, he considers the epidemiological and pathological consequences of the middle passage for newly enslaved blacks. The balance of the book is devoted to the health of the black slave in the West Indies. Using the general health and level of nutrition of the island whites as a control, Kiple pays especially close attention to the role that nutrition played in the development of diseases. The study closes with a look at the continuing demographic difficulties of the black West Indian from the abolition of slavery.
 

Contents

The Peoples and Their Pathogens
7
West African Diet and Disease
23
The Parameters of West African Survival
38
Diet Disease and Demography
51
Introduction
53
The Middle Passage and Malnutrition
57
Plantation Nutrition
76
Malnutrition Morbidity and Mortality
89
Black Diseases and White Medicine
135
Pathogens and Politics
157
Introduction
159
Fevers and Race
161
Epilogue Diet Disease and Displacement
177
Notes
189
Bibliographic Essay
259
Index
266

Slave Demography
104
Slave Infant and Child Mortality
120

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