Historiographic Overview
For students and teachers, this section provides examples of the secondary literature on this topic. In general, this essay serves as an overview of some of the issues relevant to this subject.
Overview: African Americans and Healing
As you may have gleaned from the introduction to this section, investigating the experience of health and healing among African Americans in 18th-century Philadelphia is not a straightforward exercise. There is no “definitive” book on the healing beliefs and practices of this particular group of early Americans. The absence of such a book is both a reflection of the paucity of relevant and accessible primary source material, as well as an invitation to negotiate the historiography of a variety of academic fields.
In this essay, we want to introduce you to the range of scholarship that characterizes the historiographic landscape of health and healing among African Americans in the 18th-century. We will do this by briefly presenting the arguments of a representative work from three of the fields that were the most useful in our efforts to think about this subject: United States colonial history; African-American studies (which includes African cultural history); and religious studies. These works are linked by a shared perspective that while the beliefs and practices of blacks in colonial America were influenced by those of whites, interactions between blacks and whites in all locations, including Philadelphia, were characterized by a two-way cultural exchange.
In our discussion of these secondary sources, we will also touch on issues connected to the nature of primary source material available for scholars. As you read this essay and the other materials provided in this section, we encourage you to think about the varied interpretations these resources can inspire. What kinds of primary and secondary materials would you choose to explore the experience of healing among African Americans in 18th-century Philadelphia?
Wright
Understanding the experience of health and healing among African Americans in 18th-century Philadelphia requires attention to broader issues in African-American history during the colonial period. A useful introduction to the situation of blacks in America during the colonial era is Donald R. Wright’s 1990 book, African Americans in the Colonial Era: From African Origins Through the American Revolution (Wright). Published as part of the American History Series, this book provides a nice synthesis of the general historiography on African Americans during the time-period. While Wright does not conduct much of his own interpretation of primary source material, the book is more sophisticated and useful to historians-in-training than the average textbook. Much as we are doing in this essay, Wright draws on some of the strongest scholarship in a number of related fields to advance a multi-faceted historiographic argument. He emphasizes that the experience of blacks during the colonial era was diverse and that much of the course for the subsequent history of African Americans was set during that time.
Similar to this website, Wright has the pedagogical goal of “challenging the student to participate actively in exploring American history and to collaborate in the creative and rigorous adventure of seeking out its wider reaches” (Wright, vi). Indeed, the lengthy bibliographic essay provided proved to be a valuable resource for orienting ourselves within the larger history of African Americans in the 18th century.
Though Wright’s attention to health and healing is limited, focusing largely on the health conditions of plantation slaves, the information he does provide reminds us that while many experiences and practices can be extrapolated to African Americans living in different regions, we must be aware that experiences of health and healing among African Americans living in the North might have varied in some ways from those in the South. For example, although slavery was practiced throughout the colonies, blacks living in different regions had different kinds of encounters with whites. We know that slaves who lived on plantations had less direct contact with whites than those who lived in northern cities. Towards the end of the 18th-century most of the blacks living in Philadelphia became free, further augmenting the nature and frequency of interaction between blacks and whites.
One of Wright’s few insights specific to blacks in places like Philadelphia was that the mid-18th century, when many slaves were being brought directly to northern ports, was a time when blacks who had been in Philadelphia for several generations became reacquainted with certain aspects of their African heritage. “As a result, northern blacks consciously . . . incorporated African social customs and practices – especially in ceremonies, folklore, singing, dancing, and leisure activities” (Wright, 89). That these northern blacks enjoyed greater autonomy than their southern peers enabled them to maintain certain African customs even as they integrated aspects of the white culture that surrounded them.
It was this insight that motivated us to look to literature in African-American studies. If we wanted to learn more about the perspective towards healing held by blacks in Philadelphia, we first needed to gain more information about healing among African Americans in general.
Bankole
Although Katherine Bankole’s 1998 book, Slavery and Medicine: Enslavement and Medical Practices in Antebellum Louisiana (Bankole), also focuses largely on plantation slavery, it was a step in the appropriate historiographic direction. Bankole devotes exclusive attention to health and healing among African Americans in the interest of bringing their experiences — as opposed to the views of their masters — to light. More than 30 years before Bankole’s Slavery and Medicine was published, historian Herbert Morais lamented the absence of attention to the role of blacks in the history of medicine in his book The History of the Negro in Medicine (Morais). With Morais’ work in mind, Bankole points out the continued neglect of the African Americans’ “proactive participation in, and development of, medicine in the U.S.” in the 1990s (Bankole, xi).
Bankole, like Wright, notes that Africans in all regions of colonial America retained a unique “Africanism” in their approach to health and healing. Taking the argument one step further, she also asserts that blacks often assisted whites in maintaining their own general health care. This distinctly African-American approach to healing combined use of distinctive materia medica with spiritual practices. The pharmacopoeia of blacks included herbs, roots, leaves, bark, and certain vegetables prepared in the form of teas or soups. An African-American remedy for yellow fever – taken by whites as well as blacks – involved equal parts pumpkinseed, whiskey, and invocation of God.
The work of scholars such as Bankole helped us to realize the potential value of looking for evidence of African-American healing practices in literature from religious studies. Yet before we discuss that literature, we want to point out that we found Bankole’s book valuable for another reason. The visits we made to a number of Philadelphia archives lend support to her assertion that since detailed records of what many enslaved blacks thought about healing are rare, it is difficult to gain a clear picture of the practices they employed to maintain health and deal with illness. The Library Company of Philadelphia’s catalogue of Afro-Americana is vast, but is un-indexed and difficult to navigate. Many of those sources that are related to healing represent the perspectives of whites.
Bankole’s discussion of primary sources also raises important questions about the problems associated with that material which may appear most useful to scholars interested in studying the experience of health and healing among blacks in 18th-century Philadelphia. Much of her analysis relies on transcripts of a collection of oral histories conducted with former slaves, many of whom remembered the stories of their ancestors. She notes that how these oral histories were conducted may have obscured important details about healing during the 18th-century. Interviewers often neglected to ask older participants to speak specifically about such experiences and were unaware of the suspicion these former slaves may have felt towards the white, government-employees conducting the interviews. Despite the limitations of such narratives – which themselves are rare (we are not aware of any specific to blacks in Philadelphia) – it is possible to learn that a large part of what made the worldview of many African Americans distinctive was the connection between healing and spirituality.
Chireau
Knowledge we had gained about African-American colonial history and medicine and slavery helped us to incorporate the perspective of religious studies scholars like Yvonne Chireau. Even more so than Bankole, Chireau persuasively argues for the connection between spirituality and healing among blacks in places like Philadelphia. In her book, Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition (Chireau), she discusses how African-American “supernatural practitioners” made sense of evil and sickness by locating illness within the problems occurring in society itself. Personal misfortune, therefore, could be linked to underlying causes such as anger, selfishness, and jealousy; an unforeseen illness could be interpreted as an affliction with spiritual origins (Chireau, 8).
Chireau, like other experts on the healing practices of African Americans in the 18th century, notes that charms, talismans, and spiritual ornaments played an important part in both preventing and curing illness. The gris-gris is an important example of a charm used to provide protection from illness. The West Africans who arrived in Philadelphia in the mid-to-late 18th century would have brought such charms with them.
In addition to exploring the role of such objects in healing practices, Chireau also makes an attempt to account for the rise of Africanized forms of Protestantism (like that of Philadelphia’s Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, founded in the late 18th century) in places like Philadelphia. She argues that these churches shared characteristics with African-based religions elsewhere and put great emphasis on the ecstatic behaviors, spirit revelations, and supernatural healing that characterized African-American conjuring and divining practices.
Chireau echoes the sentiments of scholars like Wright and Bankole in noting that exchanges of knowledge about healing between blacks and whites were common during the colonial era. Yet, perhaps the most compelling aspect of her argument is her effort to draw parallels between the magico-religious healing practices of blacks with those of many whites. “As European Americans struggled to resituate themselves in the wake of their own transatlantic displacement,” she writes, “their own religious institutions came under the assault of sectarian reformers, heretical dissenters, and radical insurgents” (Chireau, p. 44). Beneath the overarching shadow of the church, and arguably that of the rising medical field, arose alternative spiritual inclinations that persistently attracted the lay population. Much as displaced Africans drew upon traditional beliefs about the spiritual nature of healing, white European settlers in the colonies revived many such ideas of their own. Perhaps, suggests Chireau’s argument, the experience of healing among many in 18th-century Philadelphia was both more similar, and more spiritual, than the dominant narrative of the history of American medicine would suggest.
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None of the books we have discussed, or that we have included in the bibliography, was written by a scholar who identifies strictly as a historian of medicine. While this reality presents a challenge to those of us who wish to investigate healing among African Americans in 18th-century Philadelphia, we hope that our discussion of the range and location of historical arguments inspires you to undertake the creative investigation demanded by engagement with this meaningful subject.