The Caribbean Slave: A Biological History (Studies in Environment and History)

by Kenneth F. Kiple

Paperback, 2002

Status

Available

Call number

616.008960729

Genres

Collection

Library's review

An in-depth study of the health of enslaved Blacks in the Caribbean. Written by a historian without a medical background, the book is both thought-provoking and potentially misinformed.

Publication

Cambridge University Press (2002), 292 pages

Description

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.… (more)

Language

Original language

English

Physical description

274 p.

ISBN

0521524709 / 9780521524704
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