2024/11/29 by E. T. Mitchell · 1 voice
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Caribbean history, culture, and politics #History of Medicine and Tropical Health #Colonialism, slavery, and trade
paper · pdf · doi:10.57132/jiss.366
openalex publication_date 2024/11/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/23
In 1773, Alexander Johnston, a Scottish ‘Practitioner of Physick and Surgery’ in St. Ann, Jamaica, made a list titled ‘my slaves’. Beside the name ‘Galen’ he wrote ‘a Doctor’. Galen was the only enslaved person Johnston ever recognised with that title. Many slave owners called the people they enslaved and tasked with attending ill enslaved people, ‘Doctor’, ‘Doctress’, or ‘nurse’. Johnston’s records reveal that he sent Galen away to train under another white doctor before assigning him that role. Johnston and Galen both lived in a time when medical labour and expertise were increasingly masculinised in Jamaica. Juxtaposing the histories of the Alexander Johnston and Galen provides insights into how racialised notions of masculinity created and foreclosed opportunities to become a medical practitioner or healer in eighteenth-century St. Ann, Jamaica. Tracing Johnston and Galen’s parallel migrations, careers, and legacies reveals devastating truths about the ways middling Scotsmen and doctors, like Johnston, enhanced their masculinity by exploiting the enslaved and how enslaved African men healers were simultaneously incorporated and marginalized within early British colonial medical practise.