The “Practitioner of Physick and Surgery” and the Enslaved “Doctor”: Medicine, Slavery, Race, and Patriarchy in the Eighteenth-Century Jamaica

In 1773, Alexander Johnston, a Scottish ‘Practitioner of Physick and Surgery’ in St. Ann, Jamaica, made a list titled ‘my slaves’. Beside the name ‘Galen’ he wrote ‘a Doctor’. Galen was the only enslaved person Johnston ever recognised with that title. Many slave owners called the people they enslaved and tasked with attending ill enslaved people, ‘Doctor’, ‘Doctress’, or ‘nurse’. Johnston’s records reveal that he sent Galen away to train under another white doctor before assigning him that role. Johnston and Galen both lived in a time when medical labour and expertise were increasingly masculinised in Jamaica. Juxtaposing the histories of the Alexander Johnston and Galen provides insights into how racialised notions of masculinity created and foreclosed opportunities to become a medical practitioner or healer in eighteenth-century St. Ann, Jamaica. Tracing Johnston and Galen’s parallel migrations, careers, and legacies reveals devastating truths about the ways middling Scotsmen and doctors, like Johnston, enhanced their masculinity by exploiting the enslaved and how enslaved African men healers were simultaneously incorporated and marginalized within early British colonial medical practise.