Black Histories: Dialogues

Medical histories in the Black Atlantic: Transversal perspectives

This special issue examines the history of medicine in the Black Atlantic.

Africans and people of African descent have played historic, if often marginalised, roles as medical practitioners, scientists, and theoreticians for millennia across the African continent, and for centuries in Europe and the Americas. Meanwhile, the violent study and exploitation of enslaved, colonised, and coerced Black bodies has been a significant, yet largely erased, dimension of professional European and ‘Western’ medicine since at least the early modern period.

Building on a growing field of scholarship, this special issue centres Africans and the African diaspora in our understanding of medicine’s trajectories and legacies in the Atlantic world, while also placing medicine and healing at the heart of Black Atlantic studies. Through this lens, we seek contributions that interrogate medical knowledge flows, practices, and experiences from a transversal perspective, that is, across space, time, and disciplinary vantage points.

We welcome submissions on the following topics, broadly defined within a Black Atlantic context:

• African and African diasporic encounters and exchanges
• Medical knowledge and practices as modes of resistance to, or negotiation of, systems of colonisation, imperial power, enslavement, and racial science
• Knowledge retention, extraction, and rejuvenation
• Embodied/tacit and codified knowledge
• Institutional histories of medicine
• European and ‘Western’ medicine’s entanglements with Atlantic slavery, European empires and racial capitalism
• Botanical knowledge, healing, and bioprospecting
• Plant-based and synthetic medicine
• Exclusive specialisation and holism
• ‘Tradition’ and ‘innovation’ in medicine
• Medical heritage and commemoration
• Medical/health reparations
• Historically informed medical futures