Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations

by Sharla Fett

Book Overview

Exploring the charged topic of black health under slavery, Sharla Fett reveals how herbalism, conjuring, midwifery, and other African American healing practices became arts of resistance in the antebellum South.

Fett shows how enslaved men and women drew on African precedents to develop a view of health and healing that was distinctly at odds with slaveholders' property concerns. While white slaveowners narrowly defined slave health in terms...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 080785378X
• ISBN13: 9780807853788
• Release Date: May 2002
• Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 1.02 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.1" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

What I like about Working Cures

Excellent information about healing, herbs, and African American midwives in the antebellum period. Highly recommended for readers interested in health, birthing, and midwives in the African American community during that time. Unexpectedly, also great art!

Outstanding, Unique, Valuable Contribution

So many people attribute African American healing to other cultures, particularly European Americans or Native Americans. While there were bound to be cultural sharing, Professor Sharla Fett makes it perfectly clear that enslaved Africans brought their own wisdom with them concerning farming and healing, as well as certain medicinal plants, with them to the Americas during the Middle Passage. "Working Cures" is an outstanding contribution to understanding distinctly American contributions to healing made by African Americans. Fett also presents the history of conjure, root doctoring, midwifery and a great deal more as it relates to medicine and healing in the African American community. Fett also illustrates the mind/body/spirit, holistic approach of African healing employed by African Americans. "Working Cures" is essential reading for those interested in learning the unique aspects of African American healing in the United States.