WEBVTT 00:00.800 --> 00:02.833 [Steven Greenberg:] Good afternoon and thank you for coming. 00:02.833 --> 00:06.333 I'm Steven Greenberg from History Medicine division here 00:06.333 --> 00:12.166 at NLM and it is my duty today, my very pleasant duty to introduce today's speaker. 00:12.166 --> 00:17.632 Marie Jenkins Schwartz is no stranger to Washington, DC area. She received her bachelor's and 00:17.633 --> 00:22.633 master's degrees from George Mason University and her doctorate from the University of Maryland, 00:22.633 --> 00:28.899 College Park. And since 1995, she is taught in the History and African American studies programs 00:28.900 --> 00:33.166 at the University of Rhode Island, where she's now an associate professor. 00:33.166 --> 00:39.232 And her talk today is based upon her latest book, latest book, "Birthing A Slave, 00:39.233 --> 00:44.233 Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South," published by the Harvard University 00:44.233 --> 00:51.099 Press in 2006. And before I ask professor Schwartz to begin, I just would like to remind you 00:51.100 --> 00:58.000 that our next history of medicine and seminar will be Wednesday, August the 1st at 2:00 o'clock 00:58.000 --> 01:03.166 in the Lister Hill Visitor Center. The speaker will be Kristen Ehrenberger , University of 01:03.166 --> 01:08.566 Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who will speak on "The Telescopic Body: Visualizations of 01:08.566 --> 01:13.066 Normal Anatomy And Social Pathology in Weimar, Germany. But today, 01:13.066 --> 01:14.866 Professor Schwartz. 01:16.700 --> 01:20.466 [applause] 01:24.200 --> 01:26.166 [Professor Schwartz:] Thank you very much. 01:26.166 --> 01:31.966 I'm delighted to be here this afternoon. I have a lot to thank the Library of Medicine, 01:31.966 --> 01:37.466 specifically the History of Medicine Division for since I've been invited here to speak today, 01:37.466 --> 01:41.132 but also since I logged in a month, 01:41.133 --> 01:47.066 a whole July as I recall. Here doing research for this book. 01:47.066 --> 01:50.799 And so it's delightful to come back and be 01:50.800 --> 01:56.800 able to share some of my research findings. My book really focuses in on how 01:56.800 --> 02:01.100 medicine furthered slavery and how slavery furthered medicine. 02:01.100 --> 02:06.766 And I'm going to begin with a case involving a slave woman and the 02:06.766 --> 02:13.666 physician who was assigned to her care. I do want to say if. 02:13.666 --> 02:18.332 Sometimes when professors talk, they do say things that may sound 02:18.333 --> 02:24.133 confusing or odd. And now we know that. And I'm happy to have you interrupt me for 02:24.133 --> 02:27.999 clarification if you would like to do that. But I am planning on having plenty of 02:28.000 --> 02:32.733 time or I hope we'll have plenty of time for some questions afterwards also. Well, 02:32.733 --> 02:37.933 here's the case I want to share with you. In December 1841, physician William 02:37.933 --> 02:43.566 Morgan attended the childbed of Caroline. An enslaved woman who had 02:43.566 --> 02:48.166 been in labor about 26 hours. He had been summoned because the 02:48.166 --> 02:55.732 infant's position was not favorable for an unassisted birth. Morgan turned the infant who 02:55.733 --> 03:01.633 came into this world feat first. Unfortunately, the mother experienced complications, 03:01.633 --> 03:06.633 including eighteen days of hemorrhaging. For 30 days, 03:06.633 --> 03:11.066 Morgan treated the woman with enemas, blister plasters, cathartics, 03:11.066 --> 03:18.932 tonics of various types, astringents, excuse me, opium and morphine. 03:18.933 --> 03:23.099 He kept note of her progress even longer. 03:23.100 --> 03:27.700 Her health was tolerable, he observed years later. 03:27.700 --> 03:33.466 But she continued to experience occasional abdominal pain, irregular menstruation, 03:33.466 --> 03:39.899 and slight diarrhea. Perhaps more important, at least to the doctor and to 03:39.900 --> 03:44.233 his slaveholding client. She had not conceived despite, 03:44.233 --> 03:47.133 in the doctor's words, having 03:47.133 --> 03:51.066 frequent communications with her husband. 03:51.066 --> 03:55.366 No small part of an antebellum slaveholder's future earnings 03:55.366 --> 03:58.032 depended on the birth of slave children. 03:58.033 --> 04:03.033 And owners wanted women to produce living children with regularity. 04:03.033 --> 04:07.433 the United States ended its participation in the international 04:07.433 --> 04:14.799 slave trade beginning in 1808. After that, everyone knew that slavery and 04:14.800 --> 04:20.000 the southern way of life could continue only if women bore enough 04:20.000 --> 04:26.900 babies to replace the numbers of slaves who died each year. 04:26.900 --> 04:32.500 The nation was expanding geographically. And I have a few maps I brought with me 04:32.500 --> 04:37.166 today that I'd like to share with you so we can get clear on where I'm we're 04:37.166 --> 04:41.366 talking about and how things were changing. In the United States. 04:41.366 --> 04:42.299 [overhead projector utilized] 04:42.300 --> 04:48.000 The blue dots represent 1000 bales of cotton. 04:48.000 --> 04:50.300 And what was happening is the nation 04:50.300 --> 04:53.566 was expanding westward and cotton 04:53.566 --> 04:57.499 production was increasing quite rapidly. 04:57.500 --> 05:03.400 And this area of heavy blue down here, I probably should have used the laser pointer. 05:03.400 --> 05:09.866 Excuse me, that was called the "Cotton Kingdom," actually 05:09.866 --> 05:13.032 came to be known that way. 05:13.033 --> 05:20.033 And as cotton expanded westward thank you, so too did the population of slaves. 05:20.033 --> 05:26.299 And I have this rather dramatic map I want to show you whoops 05:26.300 --> 05:32.666 would help to get it the right way. The this top map shows the 05:32.666 --> 05:34.632 slave population in 1820. 05:34.633 --> 05:39.666 And each dot there represents 2000 slaves. 05:39.666 --> 05:45.432 Now look at it in 1860 and you can see it rather dramatic 05:45.433 --> 05:50.699 change and again because the international slave trade had ended. 05:50.700 --> 05:56.433 These new slaves were those that were born to women in bondage. 05:56.433 --> 06:00.433 Everyone understood the significance of that. 06:00.433 --> 06:02.266 [overhead projector sheet rustling] 06:02.266 --> 06:06.432 What began to happen is as the nation expanded westward, 06:06.433 --> 06:08.566 there was a need for more 06:08.566 --> 06:15.332 labors to grow that cotton, and the cotton wasn't grown 06:15.333 --> 06:21.199 much in the upper South. And so,what began to happen was 06:21.200 --> 06:27.900 that slaveholders in the upper south sold slaves to the lower South, 06:27.900 --> 06:31.500 and so we began to have 06:31.500 --> 06:35.566 states becoming identified as either 06:35.566 --> 06:39.999 exporting slaves or importing slaves, 06:40.000 --> 06:44.533 and you can see on the top map 1790 to 1799, 06:44.533 --> 06:47.566 you can see that Virginia and Maryland 06:47.566 --> 06:54.066 are the slave exporting states. But that begins to change 06:54.066 --> 07:00.032 over time, 1820 to 1829 you can see that South Carolina, 07:00.033 --> 07:03.266 North Carolina and Kentucky have 07:03.266 --> 07:08.966 entered this slave market as sellers of slaves and shipping them down to 07:08.966 --> 07:12.766 places like Mississippi and Louisiana. And then finally if you come down to the bottom map, 07:12.766 --> 07:19.332 you can see 1850 to 1859 that the areas of the South that are exporting slaves, 07:19.333 --> 07:24.266 selling them has expanded again and we have Texas on the map 07:24.266 --> 07:30.099 which is come into the Union. So we began to have an even larger number 07:30.100 --> 07:34.100 of areas that are importing slaves. 07:34.100 --> 07:37.700 So just wanted to show you that briefly 07:37.700 --> 07:40.833 because I think that visually lets us 07:40.833 --> 07:43.599 know that planters viewed the birth of 07:43.600 --> 07:48.100 children as both practical and profitable. 07:48.100 --> 07:53.866 Now increased interest in the birth of enslaved infants corresponded. 07:53.866 --> 08:00.766 With a change in the emphasis doctors were placing on treating women's health problems. 08:00.766 --> 08:05.132 In the early 19th century, doctors were taking an increased 08:05.133 --> 08:10.266 interest in fertility, pregnancy, childbirth and complications of 08:10.266 --> 08:16.366 childbirth to learn how they might better manage women's health. 08:16.366 --> 08:19.199 So these developments, the ending 08:19.200 --> 08:22.600 of the international slave trade, 08:22.600 --> 08:26.966 the geographically expanding nation, 08:26.966 --> 08:31.432 the growing importance of cotton cultivation, 08:31.433 --> 08:35.966 and the beginning of reproductive medicine, encouraged slaveholders 08:35.966 --> 08:41.832 to employ doctors in the hope that they might increase the number of 08:41.833 --> 08:48.033 children who were born in bondage. Now, enslaved women who bore children 08:48.033 --> 08:53.599 regularly and without complications were not cause for concern. 08:53.600 --> 08:58.566 But slaveholders began in the decades before the Civil War to summon 08:58.566 --> 09:04.466 doctors for women who had difficulty reproducing whatever the perceived 09:04.466 --> 09:11.366 cause. Protracted or difficult labor, repeated miscarriages, 09:11.366 --> 09:16.299 recurring stillbirths, irregular menstruation, 09:16.300 --> 09:20.700 vaginal tearing and other complications following childbirth. 09:20.700 --> 09:24.066 Stressed and uterine cancer and the 09:24.066 --> 09:29.666 more general failure to conceive despite opportunity all prompted 09:29.666 --> 09:35.199 slaveholders to seek medical attention for enslaved women. 09:35.200 --> 09:40.933 Now we want to remember here that gynecology and obstetrics did not emerge 09:40.933 --> 09:45.533 as medical specialties until after the Civil War. 09:45.533 --> 09:51.333 So women's diseases fell under the purview of the general practitioner 09:51.333 --> 09:56.999 who attended all medical problems on the plantations. We're not talking about doctors who have 09:57.000 --> 10:03.666 a specialty in this particular field. Although an increasing number of 10:03.666 --> 10:10.799 doctors were taking an interest in reproductive medicine. We want to remember that throughout 10:10.800 --> 10:16.766 this period, home remedies were continued to be popular. 10:16.766 --> 10:23.432 For most slaveholders, home care was the logical first step in treating the health needs of 10:23.433 --> 10:28.266 their slaves as well as themselves and members of their own family. 10:28.266 --> 10:34.166 Home care saved the expense of the doctor and in some cases was 10:34.166 --> 10:40.132 the only type of care available, especially in remote areas where there 10:40.133 --> 10:43.199 were was a shortage of physicians. 10:43.200 --> 10:46.666 And even if a physician practiced nearby, 10:46.666 --> 10:52.266 he could be tied up with another case and unavailable to come. 10:52.266 --> 10:55.132 Many slaveholders prided themselves on 10:55.133 --> 11:01.666 being independent and on being self reliant, and they avoided any dependence on others, 11:01.666 --> 11:05.366 and this extended to medicine. 11:05.366 --> 11:08.399 Some slaveholders just outright 11:08.400 --> 11:14.366 distrusted the care that doctors offer. This wasn't an age in which 11:14.366 --> 11:19.099 doctors acted boldly. Today, we would say they acted recklessly 11:19.100 --> 11:25.233 to produce a drastic change in the patient. They bled, blistered, [?puked?], 11:25.233 --> 11:30.699 purged, cut, and dosed with large quantities of drugs. 11:30.700 --> 11:35.133 So all of these reasons encourage slaveholders to rely as much 11:35.133 --> 11:38.466 as possible on home remedies. 11:38.466 --> 11:42.332 Even when a doctor's services were at last deemed essential, 11:42.333 --> 11:48.599 he was not necessarily expected to appear at the patient's bedside in person, 11:48.600 --> 11:54.800 as letters to doctors illustrate. Planter James Douglas contacted 11:54.800 --> 11:58.033 physician Charles Brown only after 11:58.033 --> 12:03.899 his woman had been ill for 9 days. Douglas, in his letter, 12:03.900 --> 12:07.700 said that he had bled her several times already. 12:07.700 --> 12:13.633 But that her condition had deteriorated. He still didn't ask the doctor to come, however. 12:13.633 --> 12:19.233 He merely wrote and asked the doctor to clarify which side 12:19.233 --> 12:24.999 the woman should be bled from. Home remedies often mirrored the kinds of 12:25.000 --> 12:31.966 remedies that physicians saw use themselves. Planter William Payne did not 12:31.966 --> 12:35.366 even specify whom they were for. 12:35.366 --> 12:39.099 When he wrote Doctor James Carmichael quote, 12:39.100 --> 12:45.666 to "send me up a box of your blue pills." Many planters like Payne, 12:45.666 --> 12:50.832 kept a variety of medicines on hand to treat whatever problems 12:50.833 --> 12:56.866 might arise on the plantation. So even when a doctor showed up, 12:56.866 --> 13:01.299 home remedies still did not cease an importance. 13:01.300 --> 13:07.200 Home remedies were often used either simultaneously or sequentially, 13:07.200 --> 13:10.800 with the care that the doctor provided. 13:10.800 --> 13:15.900 When the enslaved Peggy was ill in Baton Rouge, 13:15.900 --> 13:22.066 her mistress complained that she thought this woman would never 13:22.066 --> 13:29.066 get well because she persisted in using home remedies which in 13:29.066 --> 13:35.799 the mistresses eyes contradicted or counteracted, I should say, 13:35.800 --> 13:42.500 the effect of medicine and careful nursing that the mistress said she was providing the woman. 13:42.500 --> 13:47.733 Well, as this case illustrates, I hope most of the home remedies 13:47.733 --> 13:52.599 that slaves used were those they devised themselves. 13:52.600 --> 13:57.200 Enslaved women were distrustful of both slaveholders and their doctors, 13:57.200 --> 14:02.500 and preferred their own healing traditions. They placed faith 14:02.500 --> 14:08.533 in the wisdom of other women who administered teas and other preparations, 14:08.533 --> 14:14.766 evoked spiritual cures, pleaded with slaveholders for the 14:14.766 --> 14:19.499 amelioration of slavery's worst features, 14:19.500 --> 14:24.800 especially overworked and harsh punishments, 14:24.800 --> 14:29.366 and they trusted their own bodies to see them through pregnancy, 14:29.366 --> 14:33.232 childbirth and aftercare. 14:33.233 --> 14:37.466 Because slaves viewed childbirth as a 14:37.466 --> 14:43.799 particularly dangerous time for women, they wanted attendance at childbed who 14:43.800 --> 14:49.766 understood their fears and who could give them advice about how to handle the chain 14:49.766 --> 14:53.199 of events leading to and beyond birth. 14:53.200 --> 14:59.533 When white doctors attended black women, the women confronted men 14:59.533 --> 15:04.066 who appeared ignorant of practices important for ensuring the 15:04.066 --> 15:10.232 wellbeing of mother and child, and who were focused on identifying 15:10.233 --> 15:16.499 a physiological problem, the diagnosis and it's 15:16.500 --> 15:20.100 therapeutic correction the cure. 15:20.100 --> 15:23.500 Only rarely did a doctor considered demanding 15:23.500 --> 15:26.866 work regimens and other social conditions. 15:26.866 --> 15:33.499 As possible sources of a woman's ailments. But for slaves, 15:33.500 --> 15:39.733 birth was more than a physiological episode. Events that occurred during pregnancy 15:39.733 --> 15:43.766 and childbirth had meaning. They required interpretation and, 15:43.766 --> 15:47.066 in some cases, action. 15:47.066 --> 15:52.532 The midwife, the traditional birth attendant, helped parents understand these 15:52.533 --> 15:58.799 types of events and respond to them in an appropriate way. For example, 15:58.800 --> 16:04.500 people thought often that special rituals needed to be report performed 16:04.500 --> 16:08.833 at the birth of twins or when a child 16:08.833 --> 16:12.066 was born with the embryonic membrane, 16:12.066 --> 16:17.566 what was called the call covering its face. Mom Hagar Brown, 16:17.566 --> 16:20.799 a midwife in South Carolina, for example, 16:20.800 --> 16:26.733 knew how to brew a special tea from the call which it fed the infants. 16:26.733 --> 16:32.133 Was said to prevent the infant from seeing 16:32.133 --> 16:35.633 supernatural shapes and being 16:35.633 --> 16:41.633 subject to supernatural forces. Now, no professionally trained Dr. 16:41.633 --> 16:47.333 could do this because doctors simply did not understand the cultural 16:47.333 --> 16:52.199 beliefs that guided slave behavior. 16:52.200 --> 16:57.533 Now, doctors were reluctant to engage in the time consuming task 16:57.533 --> 17:03.099 of attending a woman in labor, and this helped enslaved women 17:03.100 --> 17:08.466 maintain control over childbirth, even when an owner engaged the doctor 17:08.466 --> 17:15.366 to attend a birth in the quarter. Physicians prized fees for attending 17:15.366 --> 17:19.466 to the health needs of slaves and many southern physicians, 17:19.466 --> 17:25.932 such as WA Brown of Georgia, cared for more black than white patients. 17:25.933 --> 17:31.166 But obstetric cases were not particularly desirable. Childbirth, 17:31.166 --> 17:35.632 in particular consumed a lot of time, 17:35.633 --> 17:39.033 and slaveholders were unwilling to 17:39.033 --> 17:44.266 pay the same fee for enslaved women 17:44.266 --> 17:49.666 as they would pay to physicians for attending a woman in their own families. 17:49.666 --> 17:56.499 Many white southerners believed that black women gave birth more easily than white women, 17:56.500 --> 18:02.800 which helped them to justify in their own mind less attention and hence a 18:02.800 --> 18:08.166 lesser fee for attending the black woman. So to protect themselves from 18:08.166 --> 18:14.766 the loss of time and money, doctors have called to childbed of a slave woman usually did not 18:14.766 --> 18:20.932 remain with her for very long, certainly not the duration of labor. They left, they came, 18:20.933 --> 18:26.966 left orders for other attendants, perhaps the midwife or maybe the woman's female friends. 18:26.966 --> 18:31.499 And then they went about their business, or maybe even visited with the 18:31.500 --> 18:36.600 owning family and the parlor. Florida physician Charles A. Hentz's 18:36.600 --> 18:41.900 experience was not that unusual. He took time out from one birth to 18:41.900 --> 18:47.100 check back at his office to see if there's been any important developments. 18:47.100 --> 18:52.833 And by the time he returned to the bedside of the enslaved woman, 18:52.833 --> 18:57.966 she had already had her baby. So enslaved women continued throughout 18:57.966 --> 19:03.099 the period leading up to the Civil War to put their faith in indigenous 19:03.100 --> 19:09.700 practices for managing women's health. Poor outcomes associated with treatment by doctors, 19:09.700 --> 19:14.300 coupled with their lack of understanding about the cultural meeting of 19:14.300 --> 19:19.266 customs associated with menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, discouraged 19:19.266 --> 19:24.432 women from wanting their services. In additions, 19:24.433 --> 19:30.666 women's health was seen as traditionally the work of women, 19:30.666 --> 19:34.732 particularly childbirth, and there was an expectation 19:34.733 --> 19:41.133 that men would not be involved. So rather than subject themselves 19:41.133 --> 19:46.833 to the invasive procedures that doctors brought to the bedside. 19:46.833 --> 19:52.766 A lot of slaves preferred to keep their medical problems hidden from you, 19:52.766 --> 19:58.766 including even pregnancies. Secretiveness reflected the degree 19:58.766 --> 20:04.899 of modesty about health matters, as well as the desire to follow 20:04.900 --> 20:10.266 the advice of black midwives, mothers and friends rather than 20:10.266 --> 20:15.932 white doctors and slaveholders. Both of whom thought it was their duty 20:15.933 --> 20:21.633 and right to manage reproductive health in the slave quarter. Now 20:21.633 --> 20:26.133 the struggle over reproductive health did not occur solely between 20:26.133 --> 20:31.633 enslaved women and doctors. Slaveholders were not always willing 20:31.633 --> 20:37.866 to concede authority to doctors once they arrived on the scene. 20:37.866 --> 20:41.866 They were accustomed to command. They were accustomed to being 20:41.866 --> 20:45.366 in charge of their slaves. 20:45.366 --> 20:51.466 And they did not give up that authority very easily. 20:51.466 --> 20:56.199 In addition, owners paid the physician. So in a sense they were the 20:56.200 --> 21:00.566 client and many a doctor came to the plantation and discovered 21:00.566 --> 21:05.599 that the slaveholder had already engaged and diagnosing the patient 21:05.600 --> 21:12.133 and maybe even come up with a plan of treatment he expected to be followed. 21:12.133 --> 21:15.333 And this was of some concern 21:15.333 --> 21:19.633 to doctors who thought that they should be 21:19.633 --> 21:25.633 in charge once they arrived on the scene. And I want to use one example, 21:25.633 --> 21:30.599 a case reported by John Young Bassett of Huntsville, AL, 21:30.600 --> 21:35.366 to illustrate the kind of thing that could 21:35.366 --> 21:38.032 occur when a doctor arrived on the scene. 21:38.033 --> 21:42.899 He was called-in, in 1838 to attend a 21:42.900 --> 21:47.466 slave who had recently given birth. She had developed a fever followed by 21:47.466 --> 21:54.366 a chill, and that the owner had decided that a physician services were necessary. 21:54.366 --> 22:00.099 Well, the doctor came and tried calomel, mercurous chloride, and quinine 22:00.100 --> 22:05.733 to relieve her symptoms. But later that day she appeared, and this is a quote, "hot, 22:05.733 --> 22:08.766 dry and restless, her pulse fluctuating, 22:08.766 --> 22:15.499 and mine wandering." Well, the doctor spoke to both the master and mistress, 22:15.500 --> 22:20.766 and learned that all three of them had been treating her simultaneously. 22:20.766 --> 22:22.966 They had all been administering 22:22.966 --> 22:30.132 quinine and didn't know it until the woman fell into a stupor, 22:30.133 --> 22:35.633 and the three came together to consult what the others had been doing. 22:35.633 --> 22:41.566 So time and again doctors had to contend with this kind of situation with slaveholders. 22:41.566 --> 22:47.399 Who knew, or thought they knew what the problem was and how to treat it? 22:47.400 --> 22:51.833 Physicians who wanted plantation business really didn't have a choice 22:51.833 --> 22:57.899 but to try to work with the slaveholder, because that was the person who was employing him. 22:57.900 --> 23:03.333 One Alabama planter went so far as 23:03.333 --> 23:06.866 to convince a doctor to actually give 23:06.866 --> 23:10.799 up the practice of regular medicine. 23:10.800 --> 23:16.200 In favor and in favor of an alternative healthcare system 23:16.200 --> 23:21.766 known as the Thomsonian System. The planter had wanted a 23:21.766 --> 23:27.232 physician to tend to slaves, but had decided the socalled heroic 23:27.233 --> 23:32.033 medicine practice by regular physicians was ineffective and he 23:32.033 --> 23:37.066 was able to convince this doctor to completely change around his practice. 23:37.066 --> 23:43.066 And I want to read to you what what he said to the doctor in a letter that helped convince him. 23:43.066 --> 23:49.166 He said, "you are struggling with a big family and we want to help you." 23:49.166 --> 23:53.899 So doctors were keenly aware of the need to please the paying 23:53.900 --> 23:57.933 physician and try to ensure that the 23:57.933 --> 24:04.366 expectations of slaveholders were met. A Tennessee mistress called in a position for a slave 24:04.366 --> 24:10.999 who had been in labor for 48 hours, and she made clear her expectation 24:11.000 --> 24:17.866 that ergot be administered to speed the labor and expel the child. This is a fungus that grows on 24:17.866 --> 24:24.266 rye and other cereal grains, and it was used to promote contractions and labor. 24:24.266 --> 24:29.232 Well, against his better judgment, the doctor in this case administered the drug, 24:29.233 --> 24:33.766 but only after what he called and this is a quote. 24:33.766 --> 24:37.966 "A little diplomatic quackery." 24:37.966 --> 24:43.199 What he did was they diluted the drug and then when the mistress's head was turned, 24:43.200 --> 24:50.066 he threw some out, you know, on the on the ground and then administered really to the enslaved woman, 24:50.066 --> 24:53.466 only a small amount, much less than the mistress had wanted. 24:58.966 --> 25:01.599 I like this example because it reminds 25:01.600 --> 25:05.600 us of something. In the patriarchal south, 25:05.600 --> 25:12.466 white men were accustomed to determining the behavior of white women, 25:12.466 --> 25:18.999 and sometimes when doctors came on to the plantation, we had, as this example illustrates, 25:19.000 --> 25:24.500 a white man answering to the directives of a white woman. 25:24.500 --> 25:28.433 And I think that this method this diplomatic 25:28.433 --> 25:33.133 quackery was used by the physician to 25:33.133 --> 25:37.033 save face in effect to preserve his own 25:37.033 --> 25:43.433 sense that his of his masculine pride. He actually recommended this to 25:43.433 --> 25:46.866 readers of a Southern Medical journal, 25:46.866 --> 25:52.399 and the editor of the Medical Journal recommended it as well. 25:52.400 --> 25:56.733 He thought this was a good way of handling this problem that 25:56.733 --> 26:00.733 periodically arose on the plantation. 26:00.733 --> 26:06.499 Well, by the antebellum era, doctors knew more about reproductive 26:06.500 --> 26:12.066 medicine than ever before. Physicians were beginning to use forceps and other instruments 26:12.066 --> 26:16.432 to aid in difficult deliveries, and new techniques allow them 26:16.433 --> 26:22.666 to verify pregnancy. But instead of benefiting enslaved women 26:22.666 --> 26:26.966 the women often found themselves subject to invasive procedures in the 26:26.966 --> 26:33.299 hands of inexperienced doctors who acted on behalf of slaveholders more 26:33.300 --> 26:39.066 than the women they were called in to assist. And I want to illustrate this with 26:39.066 --> 26:43.999 a reference to cesarean section. Cesarean sections were considered 26:44.000 --> 26:49.000 so difficult before the Civil War and so dangerous for both mother 26:49.000 --> 26:55.233 and child that doctors performed very few. Virtually all, 26:55.233 --> 27:00.299 were performed on enslaved women, 27:00.300 --> 27:03.566 and virtually all the cases, 27:03.566 --> 27:09.099 either the woman, the child, or both, died. 27:09.100 --> 27:14.566 And the difference in the status of the women who underwent cesareans and those who did not, 27:14.566 --> 27:19.732 suggest that enslaved black women were more apt than free white women 27:19.733 --> 27:23.233 to be exposed to risky treatment. 27:23.233 --> 27:29.233 Slaves feared intrusion by physicians in their reproductive lives. 27:29.233 --> 27:35.399 Extreme measures such as bloodletting were contrary to their accepted practices, 27:35.400 --> 27:39.066 and some of what passed for modern medicine was a little more 27:39.066 --> 27:43.232 than medical experimentation. 27:43.233 --> 27:48.266 Ad hoc that is practiced with whatever was available at 27:48.266 --> 27:54.499 hand for the doctor to use. Dr. W. L. Felder stumbled on what 27:54.500 --> 27:59.433 he considered a new treatment for adhesion of the placenta when the 27:59.433 --> 28:03.366 quote, "usual way" of handling a case 28:03.366 --> 28:09.566 did not produce the desired result. Called to remove the placenta from a 28:09.566 --> 28:14.166 hemorrhaging slave woman who had given birth three or four days previously. 28:14.166 --> 28:20.666 The doctor thought he achieved success by applying a sponge that 28:20.666 --> 28:26.032 had been soaked in creosote. By the time he wrote his account for 28:26.033 --> 28:32.666 a journal in January of 1853. He had performed the procedure twice, 28:32.666 --> 28:37.032 and the next time he was going to perform it, he said he thought he would just 28:37.033 --> 28:43.566 inject the creosote directly into the blood vessels of the umbilical cord. 28:43.566 --> 28:48.266 So this is the kind of things they were doing. You know, 28:48.266 --> 28:55.199 they they wanted to improve patients health. So we have to remember that, 28:55.200 --> 29:01.733 but we want to remember that free white women could decline these 29:01.733 --> 29:07.766 risky procedures and enslaved women, black women were less able to decline 29:07.766 --> 29:10.866 risky procedures than free white women. 29:10.866 --> 29:16.966 They were also more likely to be treated by inexperienced doctors. 29:16.966 --> 29:23.299 Free women declined procedures by inexperienced doctors, particularly if they were risky. 29:23.300 --> 29:29.000 But a lot of young men who had just completed medical school would 29:29.000 --> 29:34.800 get their experience in the slave quarter because enslaved women 29:34.800 --> 29:37.900 were less able to turn them away. 29:37.900 --> 29:40.333 And slaveholders were more willing 29:40.333 --> 29:46.599 to let them experience their or practice their profession on slaves 29:46.600 --> 29:49.033 in the quarter rather than family 29:49.033 --> 29:54.666 members up in the plantation house. 29:54.666 --> 29:59.699 So few, excuse me, few physicians encountered by enslaved 29:59.700 --> 30:05.366 women were really that qualified to practice reproductive medicine. 30:05.366 --> 30:09.632 Remember, we're talking about general practitioners here, and they didn't see a lot of cases, 30:09.633 --> 30:16.633 maybe over the course of a year or even years in their practice. 30:16.633 --> 30:22.299 Many doctors didn't even own a obstetrical instruments. When one of his neighbors, slaves, 30:22.300 --> 30:26.600 went into labor and the child presented itself in a way that made 30:26.600 --> 30:33.800 unassisted delivery impossible, Thomas Clark, a doctor, sent word to fellow physician 30:33.800 --> 30:37.866 Charles Brown to come quote, "if convenient, 30:37.866 --> 30:43.099 but if not to send his instruments along." Well, apparently Brown couldn't make 30:43.100 --> 30:48.500 use of the instruments because a communication later in the day had Clark 30:48.500 --> 30:53.933 admitting that he had been unable to use the instruments effectively and 30:53.933 --> 31:00.299 asking Brown to come as soon as he could. Well, given the lack of expertise, 31:00.300 --> 31:05.733 it should come as no surprise to learn that little of the medical experimentation carried out on 31:05.733 --> 31:12.933 enslaved women led to improved health. A notable exception was the work of J. Marion Sims, 31:12.933 --> 31:16.533 whose name you might recognize. By 1849, 31:16.533 --> 31:20.299 Sims working in Alabama had successfully 31:20.300 --> 31:25.500 repaired a vesicle vaginal fistula. A tear suffered by many women 31:25.500 --> 31:31.833 during childbirth in that time. And it was a tear that allowed urine to flow unimpeded from 31:31.833 --> 31:38.599 the bladder into the vagina. The condition was more loathsome than life threatening, 31:38.600 --> 31:43.333 in the words of the doctor, but his accomplishment was hailed for 31:43.333 --> 31:47.266 eliminating a condition that distressed the women have disgusted many people 31:47.266 --> 31:52.299 with whom they came in contact. Sims success in treating vesicle 31:52.300 --> 31:58.066 vaginal fistula occurred only after he performed multiple surgeries on 31:58.066 --> 32:04.699 3 enslaved women, Anarka, Betsey, and Lucy. 32:04.700 --> 32:07.833 He performed surgery on these women 32:07.833 --> 32:12.999 over the course of four years, always without anesthesia. 32:13.000 --> 32:18.600 Over 3 1/2 years. He performed operations on Anarka 32:18.600 --> 32:25.166 30 times alone. Sims is well known, in part because he moved to the North 32:25.166 --> 32:29.699 where he achieved fame for his surgical technique and eventually became president 32:29.700 --> 32:34.900 of the American Medical Association. Sims later downplayed the importance 32:34.900 --> 32:40.866 of the enslaved women in the discovery of his cure for obstetric fistula. 32:40.866 --> 32:43.866 He wrote about his early patients in vague language, 32:43.866 --> 32:49.466 and he shifted the blame for having experimented upon them by insisting that 32:49.466 --> 32:56.032 the slave cases had been thrust upon him. He also attempted to justify his early 32:56.033 --> 33:02.766 experimentation on black women by maintaining they tolerated pain better than did white women. 33:02.766 --> 33:07.599 But other lesser known physicians were doing similar experiments. 33:07.600 --> 33:11.133 One was Nathan Bozeman in Alabama. 33:11.133 --> 33:16.133 Bozeman had begun as an assistant to Sims in Montgomery, 33:16.133 --> 33:22.299 and he is publicly admitted the experimental nature of his work, which he intended 33:22.300 --> 33:28.666 to improve upon the work of Sims. He had performed Sims' operation 33:28.666 --> 33:35.432 twice on enslaved women when the idea of a button suture came to him. 33:35.433 --> 33:38.966 Quoting him now, "I immediately determined to subject 33:38.966 --> 33:44.632 the case" that is the woman "to an experimental trial", he wrote. Bozeman, 33:44.633 --> 33:50.766 who unlike Sims remained in the South throughout his career, not only boasted of perfecting a 33:50.766 --> 33:56.766 cure for the dreadful condition. But also of improving fertility 33:56.766 --> 34:01.699 among his enslaved subjects. Prior to the 19th century, 34:01.700 --> 34:06.666 most Americans attributed barrenness to providence. 34:06.666 --> 34:13.466 It was best to pray that it would be alleviated, but there were plenty of home 34:13.466 --> 34:18.766 remedies out there that held out hope for both black and white women. 34:18.766 --> 34:24.066 Physicians and surgeons who treated sterility among slaves as a medical problem, 34:24.066 --> 34:29.166 tended to focus either on physical abnormalities or irregularity 34:29.166 --> 34:34.432 of the menstrual cycle. The first group relied on 34:34.433 --> 34:40.199 instruments to correct the problem, while the second favored other types of heroic measures, 34:40.200 --> 34:46.166 such as blistering and bleeding and dosing with powerful medications. 34:46.166 --> 34:50.266 Doctors who fell into the first group thought of themselves as correcting 34:50.266 --> 34:57.332 "disordered organs of reproduction." When Virginia physician Alban S. Payne 34:57.333 --> 35:03.433 first encountered Clary in Fauquier County, he pronounced her suffering from an, 35:03.433 --> 35:08.533 quote, "inadequate" vagina. Discovering he could insert his finger 35:08.533 --> 35:14.099 no more than an inch into her vagina. He immediately decided on an 35:14.100 --> 35:19.566 operation to remove the tumor which he thought was blocking penetration. 35:19.566 --> 35:25.666 Clary survived the removal procedure, and in a subsequent visit, 35:25.666 --> 35:28.699 Payne measured her vagina and pronounced it, 35:28.700 --> 35:35.666 quote, "altogether very passable." Such efforts to manage women's 35:35.666 --> 35:41.766 health reflected the willingness of slaveholders to intrude into the most intimate affairs 35:41.766 --> 35:46.699 of enslaved women, including their monthly menstrual cycle. 35:46.700 --> 35:49.933 Although menstruation was little understood, 35:49.933 --> 35:53.633 masters and mistresses embraced the 35:53.633 --> 35:59.999 idea that achieving regularity of the menses was crucial for improving 36:00.000 --> 36:05.900 fertility and for general wellbeing in the slave quarter. Moreover, 36:05.900 --> 36:11.200 enslaved women sometimes lost work. From the field or other sites 36:11.200 --> 36:17.566 because of menstrual problems. So what happened to slaveholders 36:17.566 --> 36:22.199 kept track of menstrual cycles 36:22.200 --> 36:27.766 of enslaved women. Masters, mistresses and plantation managers 36:27.766 --> 36:33.366 came to know whose period was late, scanty, 36:33.366 --> 36:39.466 characterized by excessive bleeding, suppressed or painful. 36:39.466 --> 36:44.432 Virginia planter William Bernard, for one, kept written records of an enslaved 36:44.433 --> 36:49.466 woman's monthly cycle when she became ill. He was not the only one to do this. 36:49.466 --> 36:55.299 Doctors deemed regularity and menstruation critical for successful 36:55.300 --> 36:58.300 conception and also for wellbeing, 36:58.300 --> 37:02.833 just as the general population did. When called in to treat a young mother 37:02.833 --> 37:09.533 suffering from painful menstruation, A G Mabry discovered a complete occlusion of the vagina, 37:09.533 --> 37:16.466 which would have prevented conception as well as menstruation. Determined to correct the problem, 37:16.466 --> 37:20.899 presumably at the request of an owner, the doctor made several incisions, 37:20.900 --> 37:25.200 which healed and had to be kept being repeated. 37:25.200 --> 37:30.700 At last he inserted a bougie, a flexible instrument used for dilating, 37:30.700 --> 37:34.533 and kept that in place with the bandage which he 37:34.533 --> 37:39.233 said made eventually a perfect cure. 37:39.233 --> 37:45.899 When it came to a regular menstruation, once again much of the medical treatment was experimental. 37:45.900 --> 37:49.600 T. L. Oger reported treating a slave girl 37:49.600 --> 37:56.266 of 17 for suppressed menstruation. Oger tried a variety of treatments, 37:56.266 --> 38:03.199 which had the effect of producing diarrhea, but not the menses. At the urging of a friend. 38:03.200 --> 38:09.966 Oger tried an experiment using the water pepper plant. It supposedly produced the desired effect, 38:09.966 --> 38:13.366 and Oger touted the cure and an essay written for a Southern Medical 38:13.366 --> 38:17.199 journal in which he claimed to have tried the treatment on other women, 38:17.200 --> 38:23.266 including two white neighbors. So this serves as a reminder that from time to time, 38:23.266 --> 38:28.466 doctors did try experimental protocols on free white women, 38:28.466 --> 38:34.866 but they often have been tried first on enslaved black women. 38:34.866 --> 38:39.332 The nature of southern doctoring evoked criticism outside the region, 38:39.333 --> 38:44.933 in part because the doctors relied on slave women as experimental subjects 38:44.933 --> 38:48.899 who did not give consent for treatment. 38:48.900 --> 38:55.533 When it came to publicizing their findings, southern physicians found themselves on the defensive, 38:55.533 --> 39:01.699 forced to stipulate that they had gained a the patient's consent 39:01.700 --> 39:06.933 for treatment within a system that did not require its legal or did not 39:06.933 --> 39:12.666 think of it as a legal necessity. Henry Frost, the Doctor of Charleston, SC, 39:12.666 --> 39:17.799 assured readers of the Western Journal of Medicine and Surgery that 39:17.800 --> 39:22.900 a slave mother under his care had approved his performing and embryotomy 39:22.900 --> 39:29.166 during a long and difficult labor. The purpose of an embryotomy was to 39:29.166 --> 39:32.132 dismember a fetus to affect its removal. 39:32.133 --> 39:38.899 When natural delivery proved impossible. Doctor Paul Eve also maintained he 39:38.900 --> 39:44.333 had obtained a slave woman's consent, this time for surgery. 39:44.333 --> 39:50.299 3 doctors had consulted in his case involving a slave by the name 39:50.300 --> 39:55.866 of Mary who had never conceived, although she had been married for years. 39:55.866 --> 40:02.599 Mary's only other symptom besides failure to concede, was great irregularity in menstruation, 40:02.600 --> 40:09.000 which to the doctor suggested she had a tumor. Eve examined her and decided that 40:09.000 --> 40:15.600 she only had a few months to a year to live and proposed a 40:15.600 --> 40:21.666 removing the entire uterus. A procedure that noted Philadelphia 40:21.666 --> 40:25.466 physician Charles Migs said had no hope 40:25.466 --> 40:32.332 of success, even if performed correctly. Eve performed the procedure, 40:32.333 --> 40:38.599 and Mary reportedly lived three months in a week following the operation. 40:38.600 --> 40:44.566 Eve later wrote about the events, emphasizing that everyone involved 40:44.566 --> 40:50.066 knew that Mary had only had a very slim chance of surviving, 40:50.066 --> 40:53.166 and that Mary herself knew that. 40:53.166 --> 40:57.666 And had agreed to the procedure. Mary's uterus, by the way, 40:57.666 --> 41:02.066 ended up in Mig's Philadelphia Museum, 41:02.066 --> 41:08.399 a Medical Curiosity. So Frost and Eve's assurances to the contrary, 41:08.400 --> 41:13.933 physicians who treated slaves, even those who performed surgery, carried on their work, 41:13.933 --> 41:19.966 in the words of J Marion Sims, whether the patient was willing or not. 41:19.966 --> 41:26.699 Everyone knew the owner's consent was necessary, not the slaves. Indeed, when WV 41:26.700 --> 41:31.100 Brown of Georgia received criticism for administering medication 41:31.100 --> 41:37.100 to a pregnant slave woman that brought about an abortion, 41:37.100 --> 41:42.933 he defended himself this way, and I'll read his words. "The owners of the property were apprised 41:42.933 --> 41:47.899 of what would probably be the result, but as we regarded it as 41:47.900 --> 41:49.966 the least of two evils. 41:49.966 --> 41:55.666 The owners consented to its administration." 41:55.666 --> 42:00.266 So out of concern that they might be subject to painful and dangerous procedures, 42:00.266 --> 42:05.599 abortions or degrading treatment, including the display of body parts as 42:05.600 --> 42:12.500 medical curiosities and even aborted fetuses. Some slaves hid pregnancy and 42:12.500 --> 42:18.733 even the onset of labor as long as possible from their owners. 42:18.733 --> 42:23.366 Despite even life threatening complications, 42:23.366 --> 42:29.566 even when an owner arranged an advance for a doctor to attend a slave woman, 42:29.566 --> 42:35.366 the doctor really didn't know when to come unless some slave from 42:35.366 --> 42:38.699 the quarter let someone else know 42:38.700 --> 42:45.566 that the slave had gone into labor. One South Carolina physician 42:45.566 --> 42:51.066 waited for hours beside the bed of a slave woman 42:51.066 --> 42:55.132 supposedly on the verge of giving birth, 42:55.133 --> 43:01.166 only to discover to his astonishment that there was no child. 43:01.166 --> 43:05.899 The woman had given birth in the field hours earlier, 43:05.900 --> 43:11.866 but she chose not to tell him, apparently not wanting him 43:11.866 --> 43:17.232 to become involved, perhaps hoping that he would tire of the 43:17.233 --> 43:23.766 labor coming to an end and leave, as many doctors did. 43:23.766 --> 43:28.132 When a Tennessee woman with a swelling abdomen experienced pain 43:28.133 --> 43:33.199 and other symptoms of miscarriage. She denied that she was in a family way. 43:33.200 --> 43:38.033 Now we really want this woman was seven months pregnant in labor and 43:38.033 --> 43:44.766 denying that she was in a family way. Her owner was very concerned and 43:44.766 --> 43:50.532 called in three physicians to consult in this case because the owner 43:50.533 --> 43:55.799 was concerned for her health and possibly the health of the child. 43:55.800 --> 44:00.533 Although I think by then they probably knew that the infant was dead. 44:00.533 --> 44:05.233 So that doctors attempted to preserve the woman's health by inserting 44:05.233 --> 44:12.266 a catheter and and doing so they puncture the punctured the bladder through the wall of the abdomen. 44:12.266 --> 44:15.399 The patient died that night. 44:15.400 --> 44:21.000 The doctors did not get any responsibility for the unfortunate outcome. 44:21.000 --> 44:25.866 Instead, they speculated that the woman had, and this is their words, 44:25.866 --> 44:30.166 "had taken something to prevent conception." 44:30.166 --> 44:36.132 Or perhaps the woman had a tumor that had prevented the baby from going, 44:36.133 --> 44:41.966 but they had done nothing to bring about the woman's death. Now we don't really know because 44:41.966 --> 44:46.232 records don't exist what the slave woman thought family might have thought. 44:46.233 --> 44:52.233 But based on the reading I have done of 44:52.233 --> 44:55.433 slave sources and physician accounts, 44:55.433 --> 44:58.166 it seems likely they would have blamed 44:58.166 --> 45:04.199 the doctor and probably the slaveholder. So slaveholders and the doctors 45:04.200 --> 45:09.133 they hired viewed in slave women's childbearing capacity as a commodity. 45:09.133 --> 45:13.466 That could be claimed for profit, a means of ensuring the continuation 45:13.466 --> 45:18.432 of Southern society and a way of enhancing the professional and 45:18.433 --> 45:24.666 financial standing of doctors. Owners kept careful account of the birth of babies, 45:24.666 --> 45:30.766 listing them among their assets much as they did colts and calves. 45:30.766 --> 45:35.066 But enslaved women look upon childbearing differently. 45:35.066 --> 45:38.899 Like people today, they wanted children. 45:38.900 --> 45:45.800 For a chance to love and to be loved, children reminded them of 45:45.800 --> 45:50.600 their shared humanity. Motherhood and fatherhood help slaves 45:50.600 --> 45:56.500 maintain an identity that went beyond that of the slave and the masters 45:56.500 --> 46:01.133 field or the mistresses kitchen. 46:01.133 --> 46:06.533 In addition, mothers and fathers worked long hours for owners. 46:06.533 --> 46:10.233 And children carried out a host of jobs 46:10.233 --> 46:15.799 of practical benefit to enslaved families. They cleaned, gardened, 46:15.800 --> 46:21.266 gathered nuts and berries, fished, trapped animals and cared 46:21.266 --> 46:27.132 for younger siblings, for example. So encounters between black mothers and 46:27.133 --> 46:32.399 white doctors in the South during the decades leading up to the Civil War. 46:32.400 --> 46:38.500 Sparked important new ways in which slavery and medicine were changing. 46:38.500 --> 46:42.300 The reach of slavery became more intrusive 46:42.300 --> 46:46.000 into the lives of enslaved women, 46:46.000 --> 46:51.433 and slave owners sought to use medicine to exploit women's capacity for 46:51.433 --> 46:57.766 childbearing for their own purpose. Simultaneously, medicine 46:57.766 --> 47:01.499 became entwined with the cause 47:01.500 --> 47:07.166 of slavery's continuance. Childbearing came to be seen 47:07.166 --> 47:13.732 increasingly as a medical problem, and doctors grew more conversant with 47:13.733 --> 47:19.399 matters of reproductive health as they gained experience in examining 47:19.400 --> 47:26.566 and manipulating women's bodies. Enslaved women struggled against these trends. 47:26.566 --> 47:31.599 Relying on secretiveness and the reluctance of men to invest much 47:31.600 --> 47:38.133 time in the work of birthing babies, and in this way they attempted to 47:38.133 --> 47:44.799 maintain control over their own bodies. I'd like to stop now and maybe take some 47:44.800 --> 47:50.966 questions if we have some time for that. OK? 47:50.966 --> 47:54.032 Yes. I see a question back here. 47:54.033 --> 47:57.133 [Steven Greenberg:] Actually, before, if you push the 47:57.133 --> 48:03.466 little button in front of you, your microphone would become live and we can hear you. 48:03.466 --> 48:08.199 [Audience 1:] Were there any attempts at birth control from enslaved women who felt like 48:08.200 --> 48:11.766 they didn't want to bringchildren into slavery? 48:11.766 --> 48:17.132 [Professor Schwartz:] Is that noise OK? Oh, OK. 48:17.133 --> 48:21.366 I thought maybe I was doing something with moving around with the microphone. 48:21.366 --> 48:25.966 Actually, this is a subject that I have been very interested in and I do 48:25.966 --> 48:32.666 talk about in my book quite a bit, because I think the way we tend to ask 48:32.666 --> 48:37.799 the question sometimes comes about being rather presentminded by that means. 48:37.800 --> 48:44.266 We tend, I think all of us do. I certainly do. It's your first impulse to project 48:44.266 --> 48:47.299 back into time the same ideas and 48:47.300 --> 48:51.566 concerns that you have today. 48:51.566 --> 48:54.066 And I preface my remarks with 48:54.066 --> 48:59.666 that comment because women did try to space their children. 48:59.666 --> 49:04.132 They had an idea of how they 49:04.133 --> 49:09.866 wanted to give birth to children. They didn't want the children to be 49:09.866 --> 49:15.266 born too close together because if the children were born too closely together, 49:15.266 --> 49:20.932 they risk put them at risk because this was an age. 49:20.933 --> 49:26.566 When children didn't thrive unless they were breastfed and enslaved, 49:26.566 --> 49:32.666 women worked hard for the owners and didn't have a lot of time to care for the children. 49:32.666 --> 49:37.432 And so women did things to try to 49:37.433 --> 49:42.699 prolong the time between births. One of the things they did was 49:42.700 --> 49:47.666 they breastfed for a long time, which tends to repress ovulation 49:47.666 --> 49:53.166 and suppress the birth rate. But they also had folk remedies, 49:53.166 --> 49:58.332 including herbs that they would take. They would chew cotton root, for example, 49:58.333 --> 50:03.866 which was said to bring on the menses. And they were doing this, 50:03.866 --> 50:09.932 though not because they didn't want children, because the overwhelming majority 50:09.933 --> 50:15.699 of women wanted children, but what they wanted was a healthy 50:15.700 --> 50:21.766 birth and to maintain the health of the child and to maintain their own health. 50:21.766 --> 50:27.866 Sometimes physicians noted the kinds of things, 50:27.866 --> 50:31.399 and slaveholders noted the kinds of things women were doing, 50:31.400 --> 50:35.500 such as chewing the cottonroot to space out births. 50:35.500 --> 50:40.100 And they said that women were 50:40.100 --> 50:44.533 aborting their their fetuses and 50:44.533 --> 50:49.933 engaging in deliberate abortion. I really think this was a very deep 50:49.933 --> 50:55.099 cultural misunderstanding because as I have read those accounts 50:55.100 --> 51:01.900 that charge enslave women with carrying out abortion deliberately, 51:01.900 --> 51:06.600 it is always from slaveholders or their 51:06.600 --> 51:10.633 physicians and always couched in a way 51:10.633 --> 51:13.966 to explain why the birth rate was low, 51:13.966 --> 51:20.366 why so many babies died in infancy. They never really thought about 51:20.366 --> 51:24.899 the hard work regimens as taking a toll on Women's Health, 51:24.900 --> 51:29.700 taking a toll on the birth of children or infants. 51:29.700 --> 51:35.266 And they did so, but they didn't want to accept 51:35.266 --> 51:38.599 that responsibility on their own. And they put it off onto slave women. 51:38.600 --> 51:43.166 They said it's all slave women's fault, that they know means of aborting their fetuses. 51:43.166 --> 51:48.366 And they're doing this all the time, yes. 51:48.366 --> 51:52.266 [Audience 2:] Oh, it's quite a sad and sort of unnerving commentary. 51:52.266 --> 51:54.199 [Professor Schwartz:] It is. 51:54.200 --> 52:00.533 It was quite upsetting for me sometimes when I would read some of these accounts. 52:00.533 --> 52:05.833 [Audience 2:] But I noticed that you mentioned white men, 52:05.833 --> 52:11.299 white women and black women, but you don't mention black men. 52:11.300 --> 52:15.666 So I guess in that regard, what role did? 52:15.666 --> 52:19.232 The father of the child play in 52:19.233 --> 52:22.433 terms of the owner of the black 52:22.433 --> 52:25.766 people at that time playing them, 52:25.766 --> 52:28.766 determining to bring in the doctor as 52:28.766 --> 52:33.666 well as if it was them mating or mixing. 52:33.666 --> 52:40.632 Having a black male that they considered profitable to mate with, 52:40.633 --> 52:45.466 a black female that may or may not have known each other in order to generate a 52:45.466 --> 52:51.566 progeny that they felt would they get a lot of money for versus or along 52:51.566 --> 52:57.899 with progeny of the slave owner, his son, and one of the slaves that one of the women, 52:57.900 --> 53:02.733 black women that he raped. What role did that play in terms of them bringing in the medical 53:02.733 --> 53:08.966 establishment versus a few that did try to create some semblance of family with a black man 53:08.966 --> 53:11.699 and a black woman having their own child? 53:11.700 --> 53:16.433 [Professor Schwartz:] Well. You've got a number of good issues there. 53:16.433 --> 53:20.633 And basically one of the things I think you're asking me is whether 53:20.633 --> 53:24.299 deliberate breeding took place and whether there was any deliberate 53:24.300 --> 53:29.566 effort to think about how to "breed" 53:29.566 --> 53:34.832 "superior," we might say physically superior slaves. [Audience 2:] But we know there was deliberate breeding. 53:34.833 --> 53:38.933 But also, if so, I guess that's part of it, deliberate breeding as well 53:38.933 --> 53:44.999 as in the accidental child. Childbirth taking place through 53:45.000 --> 53:50.900 a rape of one of the slaves that in that instance where they more apt to bring in a doctor. 53:50.900 --> 53:57.266 [Professor Schwartz:] Well I I do want to say that I did not find examples of deliberate breeding. 53:57.266 --> 54:02.032 You know most slave women and men wanted to have children for some of 54:02.033 --> 54:08.099 the reasons I've cited here. There is simply was no reason to try to breed 54:08.100 --> 54:14.766 slaves because they were being born out of the natural impulses that we feel today, 54:14.766 --> 54:18.966 for why people want children. 54:18.966 --> 54:22.699 There were people thinking about how to 54:22.700 --> 54:28.400 pair men and women so to "improve the stock," 54:28.400 --> 54:33.966 if I can be so crass as to use that term because that's the way some of them thought about. 54:33.966 --> 54:37.699 But that was really not, I don't think, what was going on. 54:37.700 --> 54:40.466 You asked about rape and sexual exploitation, 54:40.466 --> 54:46.632 and I think that that is a factor that certainly we want to think about 54:46.633 --> 54:52.999 as we think about this subject. But again, the end result is if 54:53.000 --> 54:59.033 a white man raped a black woman, there might be a child resulting, 54:59.033 --> 55:03.466 but most men and women wanted to pair up. 55:03.466 --> 55:08.732 They they wanted to have mates. Preferably for life, 55:08.733 --> 55:15.033 and they didn't need that kind of encouragement from the slaveholder. 55:15.033 --> 55:20.233 There were some odd attempts to try to do that sort of thing, but they were not 55:20.233 --> 55:23.699 they were more the exception rather than the rule. 55:23.700 --> 55:28.166 Again, because people want to families. 55:28.166 --> 55:33.566 Enslaved men did play an important role in the rearing of children. 55:33.566 --> 55:39.632 Men constructed cabins, they constructed furnishings, they got fuel for the family, 55:39.633 --> 55:43.666 they did all kinds of things. They worked very hard and many of their 55:43.666 --> 55:49.066 those kinds of activities were done for the family and not just for themselves. 55:49.066 --> 55:54.999 So men played an important role. I have focused in this book on doctors, 55:55.000 --> 55:59.700 slaveholders and women just because of I'm looking at reproductive medicine. 55:59.700 --> 56:03.500 But elsewhere I've written about the role men have played in the 56:03.500 --> 56:05.700 rearing of children in my first book, called 56:05.700 --> 56:09.533 Born in Bondage: Growing Up Enslaved in the Antebellum South. 56:09.533 --> 56:11.899 And in that book I tried to focus not 56:11.900 --> 56:15.833 just on what mothers were doing to rear children, but also fathers as well. 56:15.833 --> 56:21.366 I'm not sure I've really answered your question quite the way you phrased it, 56:21.366 --> 56:27.132 but I just don't see massive efforts to try to deliberately breed 56:27.133 --> 56:32.366 slaves in the South. 56:32.366 --> 56:33.699 Anything else? 56:33.700 --> 56:37.633 [Audience 3:] I guess from as a researcher 56:37.633 --> 56:43.566 for me it's always you look at the past, maybe understand the future. So what do you think is the 56:43.566 --> 56:50.932 significance of your research in terms of current healthcare? Is it just a visitation of things 56:50.933 --> 56:55.533 that happened in the past or is the knowledge that you gathered, 56:55.533 --> 56:59.899 do you think it's going to somehow change or health healthcare, 56:59.900 --> 57:02.166 is it just knowledge for knowledge's sake? 57:02.166 --> 57:05.299 [Professor Schwartz:] Well, I think one of the lessons 57:05.300 --> 57:10.400 I've learned and looking at the past is to realize that medicine is 57:10.400 --> 57:15.266 not just about the biology or the 57:15.266 --> 57:20.299 the physical world. Medicine is 57:20.300 --> 57:25.266 practiced in a social environment. And I think what you can see from this book 57:25.266 --> 57:28.366 is that southern doctors were practicing in 57:28.366 --> 57:31.832 a social environment in which slavery was 57:31.833 --> 57:36.633 accepted and they did not question that. 57:36.633 --> 57:41.266 They did not go about looking at the 57:41.266 --> 57:46.699 problems in slave women were having in bearing children and raising them 57:46.700 --> 57:54.033 through infancy. With the idea that, Gee, what's going on here? Why is the death rate so high? 57:54.033 --> 57:59.033 They were doing things like saying, black women are engaging in deliberate 57:59.033 --> 58:03.533 abortion and they weren't thinking about the really harsh punishments and 58:03.533 --> 58:08.433 the really harsh work environments that these women were engaged in. 58:08.433 --> 58:12.299 And I so I think that's one thing that because I'm interested in them 58:12.300 --> 58:17.200 with the social history of medicine, that that's one thing that we can see here. 58:17.200 --> 58:20.966 Another thing that we can see is that in 58:20.966 --> 58:25.999 some ways these doctors were practicing 58:26.000 --> 58:31.700 in what maybe today maybe romanticized as kind of an ideal environment 58:31.700 --> 58:35.966 for doctors to practice in and that there were no regulations. 58:35.966 --> 58:39.532 There were no rules about gaining patient 58:39.533 --> 58:45.999 consent or following particular protocols. And there were people in Europe and in the north, 58:46.000 --> 58:49.633 doctors who were saying this gave southern 58:49.633 --> 58:53.599 physicians a decided advantage because 58:53.600 --> 59:00.300 they could do what they wanted with certain "experimental subjects." 59:00.300 --> 59:06.200 And what we see here is not that the south southern doctors are raising the 59:06.200 --> 59:12.200 practice of medicine to new standards. They're not. In many ways, southern physicians were seen 59:12.200 --> 59:17.466 as lagging behind their northern and European counterparts. 59:17.466 --> 59:24.299 And what I contend is that because they were practicing in this environment where all they had to do 59:24.300 --> 59:30.100 was to gain the approval of the slaveholder or in some cases they 59:30.100 --> 59:35.000 actually purchased slaves themselves. That what this did was not made for 59:35.000 --> 59:38.733 better medicine because they can do whatever they will and not have to worry 59:38.733 --> 59:42.666 about government regulators and so on. In fact, what it made for was reckless 59:42.666 --> 59:46.399 medicine that really didn't advance 59:46.400 --> 59:49.533 the practice of medicine very far. 59:49.533 --> 59:55.699 Jay Marion Sims was a notable exception. But I emphasize him and I wanted to talk 59:55.700 --> 01:00:00.500 about him today because he has an exception. We don't see right innovations coming 01:00:00.500 --> 01:00:07.033 out of the south in the period of that I've been talking about. Yes, we have a question back here. 01:00:07.033 --> 01:00:10.933 [Audience 4:] Did you come across any female physicians during this time period? 01:00:10.933 --> 01:00:12.666 [Professor Schwartz:] You know, they're really, 01:00:12.666 --> 01:00:16.266 I did not. I've used the pronoun he threw out 01:00:16.266 --> 01:00:18.799 deliberately because I have not 01:00:18.800 --> 01:00:24.733 encountered a female physician in the south. That's not to say that women 01:00:24.733 --> 01:00:30.299 weren't involved in medicine. They were and certain when it came to home remedies, 01:00:30.300 --> 01:00:36.400 there were a lot of women, white women, who read medical manuals and purchased 01:00:36.400 --> 01:00:40.000 medicine for use on the plantation. And so they were involved in that way, 01:00:40.000 --> 01:00:45.266 but they were not trained physicians. 01:00:45.266 --> 01:00:46.399 Yes. 01:00:46.400 --> 01:00:49.733 [Audience 5:] I thought that was a wonderful presentation, 01:00:49.733 --> 01:00:56.099 although certainly a rather horrifying one. And I was interested to 01:00:56.100 --> 01:01:00.200 hear about your sources, your process of research. 01:01:00.200 --> 01:01:05.333 Was it, was this a difficult project 01:01:05.333 --> 01:01:10.233 of research where the are there simply lots of sources out there 01:01:10.233 --> 01:01:14.599 that other people have not used? If you could tell us something about that? 01:01:14.600 --> 01:01:20.533 [Professor Schwartz:] There are sources out there that not many people have used. 01:01:20.533 --> 01:01:24.466 I'm glad you asked me this particularly here at the seminar, 01:01:24.466 --> 01:01:27.732 because I have something I want to say about archival research. 01:01:27.733 --> 01:01:33.499 I used a lot of interviews that were done with former slaves in 01:01:33.500 --> 01:01:38.366 the 1930s by government agents, and there were also many narratives 01:01:38.366 --> 01:01:43.366 that were are memoirs that were written by slaves or former slaves after 01:01:43.366 --> 01:01:48.599 they escaped or after slavery ended. So that was one source and I also used plantation records 01:01:48.600 --> 01:01:54.400 that were kept by slaveholders because slaves were valuable property. They were making records of 01:01:54.400 --> 01:01:59.866 menstrual periods. They were making records of sometimes of what they were doing with menstrual rags. 01:01:59.866 --> 01:02:05.666 They were just to give some examples. So you can find those kinds of sources there. 01:02:05.666 --> 01:02:11.066 It's like looking for a needle in a haystack because they don't come up often. 01:02:11.066 --> 01:02:17.132 You have to go through a lot of material. To find these scattered references. 01:02:17.133 --> 01:02:21.833 But the other source that was very important, and the one that I used here mostly, 01:02:21.833 --> 01:02:27.499 was southern medical journals. And what I had to do there is I had 01:02:27.500 --> 01:02:33.033 to page through every page because indexes that were prepared in 01:02:33.033 --> 01:02:38.499 the 19th century or even indexes that archivists have prepared 01:02:38.500 --> 01:02:43.666 in the 20th century up until very late in the 20th century. 01:02:43.666 --> 01:02:50.332 Black women tended to be invisible. You can't look in the National Union Catalog. 01:02:50.333 --> 01:02:55.999 You can't look in indexes of any of these journals and find that they were 01:02:56.000 --> 01:03:01.600 thought of as enough of an entity to warrant a separate categorization. 01:03:01.600 --> 01:03:05.900 So the indexing tended to be about procedures. 01:03:05.900 --> 01:03:12.566 You know, you can look up collapsed uterus, but then you have to look at every single case to see 01:03:12.566 --> 01:03:19.466 whether it involved in a black woman or a white woman, and often they didn't use 01:03:19.466 --> 01:03:25.232 that kind of language. You had to be sensitive to the idea 01:03:25.233 --> 01:03:30.733 that when you're reading these cases that the physicians wrote up, 01:03:30.733 --> 01:03:33.833 they would refer to white women 01:03:33.833 --> 01:03:39.833 by misses or miss and a, the initial of their last name. 01:03:39.833 --> 01:03:45.499 With slave women though, they would refer to them as Dary or Milly, 01:03:45.500 --> 01:03:50.766 and so you had to be aware of these kinds of distinctions or you wouldn't be able to find the 01:03:50.766 --> 01:03:55.932 cases involving enslaved women. Now if you read through the case, often times you would see other 01:03:55.933 --> 01:04:02.766 clues that they were enslaved, like the owner gave his consent for this procedure. 01:04:02.766 --> 01:04:08.399 That's a pretty clear evidence that you're reading a case involving an enslaved woman. 01:04:08.400 --> 01:04:11.533 But the way our archives were done, 01:04:11.533 --> 01:04:14.733 the way indexing was done in the past, 01:04:14.733 --> 01:04:18.033 really is a terrible puts a terrible 01:04:18.033 --> 01:04:21.699 burden on people who want to do research 01:04:21.700 --> 01:04:24.900 related to African Americans and in 01:04:24.900 --> 01:04:31.166 my case and other people who have been invisible in the written record, 01:04:31.166 --> 01:04:35.632 it's something that I think is changing. I think a lot of archives are going about 01:04:35.633 --> 01:04:40.633 trying to reduce some of their finding aid. So that you can more easily know 01:04:40.633 --> 01:04:46.733 the particular collections relate have something to say about the history of of African Americans, 01:04:46.733 --> 01:04:52.433 but it's slow and it takes money and it takes a lot of time. And so it's very slow coming. 01:04:52.433 --> 01:04:56.966 But I hope that as books like mine come out that people will realize that, Gee, 01:04:56.966 --> 01:05:02.066 there are a lot of things in southern medical journals about black women. 01:05:02.066 --> 01:05:05.232 There's also a lot of things in there about black children and about 01:05:05.233 --> 01:05:08.199 black men and how they were treated. 01:05:08.200 --> 01:05:13.200 In terms of their healthcare, yes. 01:05:13.200 --> 01:05:16.566 [Audience 6:] Oh, I want to go back to that gentleman's question. 01:05:16.566 --> 01:05:19.966 You you correct me if I'm wrong, 01:05:19.966 --> 01:05:25.132 but you made it seem that the slaves people want to have families, but how could they want to have 01:05:25.133 --> 01:05:29.833 families if the the men and women were being separated and they take the children away and I don't, 01:05:29.833 --> 01:05:32.533 I don't hear or see that many families. 01:05:32.533 --> 01:05:35.233 [Professor Schwartz:] Well, I know it is. 01:05:35.233 --> 01:05:39.033 It is sad to think about a family separation, 01:05:39.033 --> 01:05:40.699 but 01:05:42.366 --> 01:05:48.532 I really, I feel the evidence is compelling. 01:05:48.533 --> 01:05:52.166 I mean, the majority of slaves had children 01:05:52.166 --> 01:05:55.566 and the majority of slaves wanted children. 01:05:55.566 --> 01:06:00.166 And in terms of sales, we want to remember that. 01:06:00.166 --> 01:06:05.666 I remember the overhead I had up here where I had slave importing and exporting states 01:06:05.666 --> 01:06:10.532 that not everybody was subject to sell, 01:06:10.533 --> 01:06:14.933 or there would be particular places that would be subject where slaves would be 01:06:14.933 --> 01:06:20.199 subject more to sale than other places. And often slaveholders did keep very 01:06:20.200 --> 01:06:26.166 young children with their parents, particularly the mother, because again, 01:06:26.166 --> 01:06:31.632 children didn't survive. Without the attention of the mother, particularly when it when they were 01:06:31.633 --> 01:06:37.266 infants and relied on breastfeeding. So if you were to separate those 01:06:37.266 --> 01:06:39.599 mothers from their children, 01:06:39.600 --> 01:06:44.366 there would have been no births and 01:06:44.366 --> 01:06:49.299 slavery could not have continued. So there was a real financial 01:06:49.300 --> 01:06:54.533 incentive for owners to keep families 01:06:54.533 --> 01:06:59.666 together to the extent that they felt their finances allowed it. 01:06:59.666 --> 01:07:04.066 Now this is not to say that after slaves got to be a certain age, 01:07:04.066 --> 01:07:09.499 maybe 12/13/14, and certainly by the time they were 01:07:09.500 --> 01:07:15.066 15 through 25 that they might be sold off from their families of origin. But you know, 01:07:15.066 --> 01:07:20.532 it's a real human desire to love someone and be with someone, I think, 01:07:20.533 --> 01:07:26.999 and we can see people behaving in this way and these circumstances. I don't. 01:07:27.000 --> 01:07:31.633 I mean, I can't think of any particular social environment where people 01:07:31.633 --> 01:07:36.333 stopped having children because their children were dying in large numbers. 01:07:36.333 --> 01:07:41.999 If you go back to the Chesapeake region in the colonial era, 01:07:42.000 --> 01:07:46.566 the death rate for children was huge, 01:07:46.566 --> 01:07:52.199 huge, and yet white men and women had 01:07:52.200 --> 01:07:57.100 children under those circumstances. They married, and when their spouses died, they remarried. 01:07:57.100 --> 01:08:02.433 And that's what I see these people doing. So I don't see African Americans 01:08:02.433 --> 01:08:08.399 under slavery acting differently from the way other Americans have 01:08:08.400 --> 01:08:12.100 acted in situations where death rates 01:08:12.100 --> 01:08:14.733 were high for spouses and children. 01:08:14.733 --> 01:08:17.366 [Audience 7:] It's a little different than death rates. 01:08:17.366 --> 01:08:21.332 I think you would have to compare to like a concentration camp where 01:08:21.333 --> 01:08:24.799 you're in an environment where you know that the family are the child 01:08:24.800 --> 01:08:29.966 that you're going to have is not going to have the best life that it possibly could. So I think, 01:08:29.966 --> 01:08:33.566 I think with both of these people are talking about, 01:08:33.566 --> 01:08:38.766 it's more of the example of Toni Morrison's "Beloved," that that wasn't 01:08:38.766 --> 01:08:43.032 just an isolated case of a parent. Going as far as that this taking 01:08:43.033 --> 01:08:49.966 their child's life to not have that environment and also I guess rape was also very prevalent 01:08:49.966 --> 01:08:54.366 in the separation of families. I think that your your graphics 01:08:54.366 --> 01:08:58.799 showed that in order to to, I don't know if you called it import expert, 01:08:58.800 --> 01:09:03.733 but in order to import slaves from other areas of the state you 01:09:03.733 --> 01:09:10.066 have to be separating them from some part of some other family so that that all goes to that. 01:09:10.066 --> 01:09:13.266 I just think it that. 01:09:13.266 --> 01:09:17.232 It really has to be careful not to to 01:09:17.233 --> 01:09:23.633 paint a picture of this family structure, of ideally family structure 01:09:23.633 --> 01:09:28.633 that in that environment people were making really hard decisions and it must have been 01:09:28.633 --> 01:09:34.799 hard even in terms of abortion. It must have been hard for some of these African American women to be 01:09:34.800 --> 01:09:40.300 pregnant with the slave owners baby. So I think that those are all issues like you said 01:09:40.300 --> 01:09:44.700 I mean your I'm sure your book goes into more details but those are all 01:09:44.700 --> 01:09:48.333 issues that that were true and did exist during those time periods. 01:09:48.333 --> 01:09:51.633 [Professor Schwartz:] Well I I want to say first of all I thank you for your comment because I 01:09:51.633 --> 01:09:55.599 didn't realize I was coming off as saying that families were these 01:09:55.600 --> 01:10:00.666 were ideal families and not at all. What I what I was trying to say is the 01:10:00.666 --> 01:10:05.366 ideal that they wanted was to have the family and they moved in that direction. 01:10:05.366 --> 01:10:11.199 I love Toni Morrison's, Beloved. It's my favorite book. I do think that is an exception. 01:10:11.200 --> 01:10:16.233 Most enslaved women did not commit infanticide. 01:10:16.233 --> 01:10:20.199 Most enslaved women did not abort their children. 01:10:20.200 --> 01:10:24.266 But one thing it would have been. 01:10:24.266 --> 01:10:30.499 Difficult, as you say, to manage pregnancy anyway, 01:10:30.500 --> 01:10:34.533 and I'm not, I don't want to suggest at all that 01:10:34.533 --> 01:10:39.899 this was an easy thing for women. I think what my book shows and examples 01:10:39.900 --> 01:10:44.533 that I used here today is that it to show it was difficult because, my gosh, 01:10:44.533 --> 01:10:50.266 the procedures that they were subjected to when things went wrong, I mean that would in it alone 01:10:50.266 --> 01:10:54.599 would have been horrifying. And to have your child separated from 01:10:54.600 --> 01:11:00.500 you through sale or for any other reason would have been horrific. 01:11:00.500 --> 01:11:03.366 I'm sure that there are people here in this room who have experienced 01:11:03.366 --> 01:11:06.866 that not in this way but in some way. And it's very difficult thing. 01:11:06.866 --> 01:11:12.232 So I don't want to discount that at all. But what I'm saying is the idea 01:11:12.233 --> 01:11:18.833 what they wanted was the family. They wanted family integrity. They work toward that. 01:11:18.833 --> 01:11:23.399 They know they didn't always achieve it. But one of the things that I have found, 01:11:23.400 --> 01:11:28.200 and I have I have looked very specifically at children of 01:11:28.200 --> 01:11:33.866 mixed race born to 01:11:33.866 --> 01:11:41.566 enslaved women. And one thing that really 01:11:41.566 --> 01:11:46.366 stands out for me is how the slaveholders 01:11:46.366 --> 01:11:51.566 rejected those children and how the 01:11:51.566 --> 01:11:56.566 enslaved community accepted them. You know, slaveholders like to talk 01:11:56.566 --> 01:12:01.466 about their families, black and white. That's how they refer to their slaves. 01:12:01.466 --> 01:12:05.099 But they were always careful to distinguish between the black family 01:12:05.100 --> 01:12:11.266 members and the white family members. You don't see that so much in the slave quarter. 01:12:11.266 --> 01:12:15.899 I really have uncovered only a 01:12:15.900 --> 01:12:22.366 couple of instances in which enslaved children were thought our 01:12:22.366 --> 01:12:28.432 children of mixed race were thought to be so close to the white family that 01:12:28.433 --> 01:12:34.433 they were rejected in the slave quarter. And in both of those instances I 01:12:34.433 --> 01:12:37.633 think it was because the two children 01:12:37.633 --> 01:12:43.499 involved were regularly tattling back to the slave holding family about 01:12:43.500 --> 01:12:49.666 what was going on in the quarter. And one little guy, in particularly particular, 01:12:49.666 --> 01:12:55.066 I remember his name is Henry, would be 01:12:55.066 --> 01:13:00.866 kept up at the owner's house during the day and was kind of treated as a pet. He was very young. 01:13:00.866 --> 01:13:06.466 He was only three or four as I recall, but he would be sent down to the quarter 01:13:06.466 --> 01:13:11.699 to find his own shelter at night because the white family didn't want him actually 01:13:11.700 --> 01:13:17.166 living in the white family's home. And he would go down and try to find somebody to take him in and 01:13:17.166 --> 01:13:22.899 people would not take him in and they would tell him if if Henry, because we know you're going 01:13:22.900 --> 01:13:27.700 to tell when you go back. But that was unusual. The majority of children, 01:13:27.700 --> 01:13:31.633 no matter what the circumstances of their birth were accepted in the slave 01:13:31.633 --> 01:13:37.433 quarter and nurtured in some way. Even Henry eventually found somebody 01:13:37.433 --> 01:13:43.233 who would help him out in the quarter. And I think this is a fundamental 01:13:43.233 --> 01:13:48.633 difference that you see within the slaveholding and the enslaved communities 01:13:48.633 --> 01:13:53.599 of how they're defining family. And I think their willingness to 01:13:53.600 --> 01:13:57.300 extend the family to include people 01:13:57.300 --> 01:14:01.700 of mixed race born of rape and 01:14:01.700 --> 01:14:04.700 exploitation isn't indication again 01:14:04.700 --> 01:14:11.166 of how important family was to them. I think family was an important way 01:14:11.166 --> 01:14:15.766 that slaves learned how to endure conditions of enslavement. 01:14:15.766 --> 01:14:22.399 They weren't learning how to endure by directives sent down from the slaveholder. 01:14:22.400 --> 01:14:26.433 They were learning at the knee of their mother, or at their father, 01:14:26.433 --> 01:14:31.699 or maybe an aunt, maybe an unrelated person. Some of you may have heard the term 01:14:31.700 --> 01:14:39.733 "fictive kin," as applied to enslaved people. Fictive kin was a term that historians have 01:14:39.733 --> 01:14:43.966 applied to certain kinds of relationships in which maybe nobody 01:14:43.966 --> 01:14:50.366 had an actual biological kin, but was taken in and accepted 01:14:50.366 --> 01:14:55.666 as a member of the family. And it was fictive kin, not a biological kin. 01:14:55.666 --> 01:14:59.299 But family I think, was extremely important to 01:14:59.300 --> 01:15:06.666 the survival of slaves. You know when. 01:15:06.666 --> 01:15:10.099 Only 5% of slaves that were ever imported 01:15:10.100 --> 01:15:13.533 into the Americas came to the area 01:15:13.533 --> 01:15:19.266 that we think of as the United States. 01:15:19.266 --> 01:15:23.666 The rest of them went to South America or the Caribbean and other places. 01:15:23.666 --> 01:15:28.666 And yet the United States became the 01:15:28.666 --> 01:15:35.266 largest slaveholding nation ever. And it's not something that 01:15:35.266 --> 01:15:39.499 we in the United States take pride in, in the sense that we were 01:15:39.500 --> 01:15:42.866 the largest slaveholding nation ever, 01:15:42.866 --> 01:15:49.199 but received substantially fewer imports of slaves than other places. 01:15:49.200 --> 01:15:55.566 How did that happen? It was because women gave birth to children who survived. 01:15:55.566 --> 01:16:00.766 That's how it happened. And so we know just from the statistics, 01:16:00.766 --> 01:16:05.799 by the time the civil war comes around, they're over 4,000,000 men, 01:16:05.800 --> 01:16:11.633 women and children alive in the United States. And that it happened because the 01:16:11.633 --> 01:16:16.533 women gave birth to children. That's one of the reasons why I decided to explore the subject. 01:16:16.533 --> 01:16:22.466 Because the United States was unique in this way that there 01:16:22.466 --> 01:16:27.532 were children being born. And even though it may be hard for 01:16:27.533 --> 01:16:30.533 us to comprehend about why children, 01:16:30.533 --> 01:16:35.666 maybe your people wanted to bring children. Into this environment, 01:16:35.666 --> 01:16:39.032 the fact is the statistics are there and 01:16:39.033 --> 01:16:42.866 we know what happened and we can only, 01:16:42.866 --> 01:16:48.066 you know, try to understand it as maybe a 01:16:48.066 --> 01:16:52.632 strength of the African American community. 01:16:52.633 --> 01:16:56.833 In the decade before the Civil War. 01:16:56.833 --> 01:17:00.133 Really in the Chesapeake region, 01:17:00.133 --> 01:17:05.566 there were women were having more children. In bondage then, slaves were dying. 01:17:05.566 --> 01:17:08.866 In bondage by about 1720 and 1740, 01:17:08.866 --> 01:17:15.432 and in the lower South in the Carolinas, that happened a little bit later than that, 01:17:15.433 --> 01:17:21.299 but but the phenomenon was there, and it was the only place in 01:17:21.300 --> 01:17:23.033 the Americas where it happened, 01:17:23.033 --> 01:17:28.833 because everywhere else they had to import 01:17:28.833 --> 01:17:33.466 slaves in order to sustain the population. 01:17:33.466 --> 01:17:36.699 Because of death rate was so high elsewhere. 01:17:36.700 --> 01:17:42.533 So we have to always kind of remember that and put it in that kind of 01:17:42.533 --> 01:17:48.666 framework to understand that the United States experience was somewhat unique. 01:17:48.666 --> 01:17:51.199 Yes, you have another question. 01:17:51.200 --> 01:17:53.766 [Audience 8:] I'm trying, I'm not trying to start trouble or anything, 01:17:53.766 --> 01:17:59.066 but I've been listening to what you said, but I read a book by Todd Savitt, 01:17:59.066 --> 01:18:05.266 East Carolina, about medicines in the South. And they had a special section on on the slaves. 01:18:05.266 --> 01:18:08.766 And what I got out of that is it seems like it's completely different from what you 01:18:08.766 --> 01:18:13.899 said because it said that back in the South, even the slave trade, they didn't get the medicine and 01:18:13.900 --> 01:18:17.866 stuff that because it was the South and they were poor and more people 01:18:17.866 --> 01:18:23.032 in the north were receiving it. I guess what I got from you, I'm please forgive me if I'm being rude, 01:18:23.033 --> 01:18:28.266 but you made it sound like it was Ozzy and Harriet and from what I've learned it wasn't. I don't. 01:18:28.266 --> 01:18:31.532 [Professor Schwartz:] Yeah, I'm not. I'm not quite sure how you got that from my remarks, 01:18:31.533 --> 01:18:37.133 since I gave some rather horrific examples. But I know Todd L. Savitt's book 01:18:37.133 --> 01:18:43.266 quite well and I don't think he is saying that they don't, that slaves didn't get medicine. 01:18:43.266 --> 01:18:48.566 He wrote about slavery in Virginia and wrote about the practice of medicine, 01:18:48.566 --> 01:18:54.966 not specifically with regard to women, though he did not really look at reproductive health. 01:18:54.966 --> 01:18:58.499 And what I want you to remember a little bit as you think about what 01:18:58.500 --> 01:19:03.266 the remarks I've made here today, is that the growth of the slave population 01:19:03.266 --> 01:19:08.766 was important to the slaveholding community. They knew that slavery could not continue, 01:19:08.766 --> 01:19:14.166 the southern way of life could not continue if women didn't have children. 01:19:14.166 --> 01:19:19.099 And so they set out in part to 01:19:19.100 --> 01:19:24.000 increase the number of children. Born through medicine because it was 01:19:24.000 --> 01:19:29.966 beginning to be important within the field of medicine for doctors 01:19:29.966 --> 01:19:34.266 to look at reproductive health. That's just one thing that they're doing. 01:19:34.266 --> 01:19:39.966 Whether they had any real impact, I don't think so, 01:19:39.966 --> 01:19:45.866 because the things the doctors were doing, you could hear, hear weren't really effective. 01:19:45.866 --> 01:19:50.566 But so why are you going to explain that large growth in the slave population? 01:19:50.566 --> 01:19:56.799 We explain it by saying. That family was important and that 01:19:56.800 --> 01:19:59.966 women wanted children and they did 01:19:59.966 --> 01:20:03.232 their best under very horrible 01:20:03.233 --> 01:20:07.999 circumstances to nurture them. 01:20:10.400 --> 01:20:14.100 [Audience 9:] Hi. Just a quick question. I don't mean to change the subject, 01:20:14.100 --> 01:20:19.833 but you mentioned before that white slave owners. 01:20:19.833 --> 01:20:23.933 blamed based on a misunderstanding 01:20:23.933 --> 01:20:27.866 that African American women were 01:20:27.866 --> 01:20:34.632 killing or aborting their children purposely. Based on that idea, 01:20:34.633 --> 01:20:37.266 I was wondering because of the 01:20:37.266 --> 01:20:43.699 prejudice and the ideas that white slave owners and doctors 01:20:43.700 --> 01:20:50.133 had and in their documentation that they had in the research. I'm pretty sure that some of their 01:20:50.133 --> 01:20:56.066 writings could have been biased based on their prejudice ideas. How did you, how were you able to 01:20:56.066 --> 01:21:01.666 shift through your research and actually 01:21:01.666 --> 01:21:07.499 come to hardcore conclusions with understanding, 01:21:07.500 --> 01:21:10.733 the biases in the documentation, do you understand what I'm trying to do? 01:21:10.733 --> 01:21:14.666 [Professor Schwartz:] Well, one thing that we have to remember, yes, that's a very good question. 01:21:14.666 --> 01:21:20.032 All documents are biased. We all have a point of view. 01:21:20.033 --> 01:21:24.766 Whoever's creating a document is going to be biased. That doesn't mean 01:21:24.766 --> 01:21:29.566 that you can't use that material. I think today, sometimes we live in 01:21:29.566 --> 01:21:35.232 a world where we say, Gee, you know, it's best if we have unbiased 01:21:35.233 --> 01:21:40.466 documents. But if you're working in 19th century society, 01:21:40.466 --> 01:21:46.199 there's no unbiased documents. I mean, this was an era in 01:21:46.200 --> 01:21:51.833 which people were very racist. But the fact that slaveholders created 01:21:51.833 --> 01:21:57.799 documents that were racist doesn't mean that you can't use those documents, 01:21:57.800 --> 01:22:03.166 because what they do is show you how slaveholders thought you have 01:22:03.166 --> 01:22:09.199 an obligation as an historian. In my case to come to those materials 01:22:09.200 --> 01:22:12.966 and try to see them as the people 01:22:12.966 --> 01:22:19.066 who created them see them and as who others in that society have seen them. 01:22:19.066 --> 01:22:24.566 So what I've tried to do is to go back and not just read through slaveholder documents and say this 01:22:24.566 --> 01:22:28.599 is what slaveholder said and not to read about just physician documents 01:22:28.600 --> 01:22:32.700 and saying this is what physicians said, but also read accounts by 01:22:32.700 --> 01:22:35.333 former slaves and slaves and say 01:22:35.333 --> 01:22:39.866 and you can begin to see 01:22:39.866 --> 01:22:43.732 through tapping into a variety of types 01:22:43.733 --> 01:22:47.266 of documents created by different people, 01:22:47.266 --> 01:22:52.366 how the viewpoints differed one to another. 01:22:52.366 --> 01:22:58.332 In some cases I read accounts by Northerners or accounts by Europeans, 01:22:58.333 --> 01:23:02.999 and they too had a particular take on what was happening with 01:23:03.000 --> 01:23:08.466 regard to medicine in the South. And so to me, that's how you deal with 01:23:08.466 --> 01:23:12.499 it is if you don't try to say, oh, I've got to get to the unvarnished truth, 01:23:12.500 --> 01:23:15.766 maybe we'll never get to that. But what you can get to is this is what 01:23:15.766 --> 01:23:20.266 slaveholders thought they were doing. This is what physicians thought they were doing. 01:23:20.266 --> 01:23:25.399 This is what slaves thought slaveholders and physicians were doing, as well as what they thought 01:23:25.400 --> 01:23:32.033 they were doing themselves. And I think that's really the only way you can go about, 01:23:32.033 --> 01:23:35.899 this kind of research or really any other kind of research because 01:23:35.900 --> 01:23:41.800 documents will always have somebody's point of view embedded in them. 01:23:41.800 --> 01:23:43.466 [Steven Greenberg:] I think we have to stop now, 01:23:43.466 --> 01:23:47.499 but I expect professor Schwartz would like hanging a few minutes later or 01:23:47.500 --> 01:23:51.800 to speak to her after the session, in the meantime, like to thank you again for coming 01:23:51.800 --> 01:23:55.533 and thank you all for being here and for asking your questions. Thank you. 01:23:55.533 --> 01:23:56.333 [applause] 01:23:56.333 --> 01:23:58.133 [Professor Schwartz:] Thank you! 01:24:01.166 --> 01:24:05.666 And thank you for your wonderful questions. I appreciated them quite a lot.