Commodified Health: Medicine, Slavery, and the Economic Construction of Racial Hierarchies in the Atlantic World, 1780-1850

This thesis examines the role of medicine in the operation and ideology of Atlantic slavery. I argue medicine was a powerful tool that helped manage enslaved people’s bodies as economic assets, shaping systems of control, profit, and survival within Atlantic slavery. Through a three-part structure tracing the journey of captured Africans—from the slave ship to the market to the plantation—it demonstrates how physicians served not as neutral caregivers but as active participants in the slave economy. On slave ships, medical professionals were tasked with sustaining the health of enslaved people to protect profits, not lives. In the market, they legitimized commodification through clinical inspection and racial pseudoscience. On plantations, they enforced discipline and surveilled claims of illness. By centering both the complicity of medical practitioners and enslaved people, this study contributes to a growing historiography that critiques the colonial and racial foundations of Western medicine. It reveals how medical knowledge upheld slavery’s logic while also offering a site of contestation, one that continues to shape racialized health disparities today.