Slavery, Medicine, and Science in the Early Modern World

This session considers the place of slavery in early modern medicine and natural inquiry. It investigates both the many ways in which early modern medicine and natural inquiry supported the institution of slavery and the settings in which slavery was integral to the production of early modern medical and natural knowledge. At the same time, we aim at casting light on the epistemic role of enslaved communities in the histories of science, medicine and technology. In recent years, a growing body of scholarship has examined the institutional apparatuses of early modern imperial medicine, paying special attention to the mobility of individuals, knowledge, practices, objects and materia medica across the globe. However, the place of slavery in early modern processes of production, movement and transfer of natural and healing knowledge and practices has only started to be explored. This session will revisit historiographies and geopolitics of early modern medicine and natural inquiry by investigating their entanglements with slavery in different settings and regions, with a focus on Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds. While the investigation of natural/medical knowledge and slavery in the Atlantic and Mediterranean areas has largely developed along separate lines, this panel will adopt different scales of observation to start a dialogue among scholars working in these areas, and explore how the interwoven networks of slavery, science and medicine can shift our perspective on the way we tell “the stories of science”.