Claire Gherini

Abstract: This dissertation links the formal, printed medical ideas theorizing the relationship between illness, season, and climate that emerged among physicians in the eighteenth century to the experimentation with new treatments for illness that took place on the ground in plantations in South Carolina, Virginia, and the British West Indies. In so doing, this dissertation calls attention to the distinctive spaces of knowledge-making characteristic of Atlantic science and highlights the role of middlemen and women—overseers, attorneys, enslaved midwives, white nurses, skilled slaves, and ship surgeons—in the plantation Americas as important agents in the creation of new therapeutic paradigms. Read Claire's report on her PACHS-sponsored research here.