The "Gazette de medecine pour les colonies," one of the few scientific journals published in the West Indies in the eighteenth century, highlighted questions plaguing eighteenth-century physicians who served both slave and planter populations in Europe's Caribbean colonies: To what extent do diseases progress and medicines metabolize differently in the bodies of Europeans and Africans? What differences among human are significant when trying to cure? This book-length project analyzes the medical sciences in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, looking in particular at scientific notions of race and human experimentation. This research analyzes how human subjects were chosen for experiments, and how notions of uniformity and variability across living organisms were developed. Did physicians imagine a natural human body that once tested held universally? Were tests done on white bodies thought to hold for black bodies (and vice versa)? Were male and female bodies considered interchangeable in this regard?
Intellectual Merit. This project explores how assumptions about race and gender formed scientific experiments, on the one hand, and how medical experimentation contributed to theorizing race and gender, on the other. It investigates a paradox faced by scientists in the eighteenth century: At the same time that defining racial difference became a priority for European science, experimenting with human subjects required that human bodies be interchangeable. Preliminary research shows that it was in the 1760s (in Jamaica) that questions first arose in a modern European colonial context about whether experiments done on the bodies of Africans were valid for European bodies, and these first questions were, significantly, about women's bodies. This project will reconceptualize research in four areas: first and foremost our knowledge of African contributions to early modern science; the historiography of race in science; the history of human experimentation; and the role of science in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world-a vibrant and quickly developing field of scholarship. The project is based in archival materials, medical books and journals, and in eighteenth-century literature on slavery, the slave trade, the plantation complex, and the like. The PI has published prize-winning books in eighteenth-century science and Atlantic world.
Broader Impacts: By expanding our knowledge of how race and gender mold science theory and practice, this project contributes to increasing the numbers of underrepresented minorities and women in science. This project integrates research and education by training students (undergraduate and graduate) in research methodologies aimed at broadening our understanding of how the multi-directional traffic that constituted the Atlantic world helped shape early modern science. The PI has been invited by the editor of "Osiris" to submit a proposal for a volume on this topic and will hold a public conference (to be funded by Stanford University) on the topic. The PI requests funding for release from two courses (winter and spring quarters 2008) and for research for two summers (2007 and 2008) in major European and Caribbean libraries and archives. This book, like the PI's others, will be written for a broad interdisciplinary and scholarly audience, and aimed at researchers and students in all areas of STS. The PI expects this book, like her others, to be widely disseminated through published with Harvard University
