Claire Gherini

Ph.D. Candidate
Department of History
Johns Hopkins University

2011 to 2012
Dissertation Research Fellow

'That Great Experiment': Plantation America and the Remaking of British Medicine in the Anglophone Atlantic, 1730-1800.

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.