Seeds of Survival and Celebration: Plants and the Black Experience: Medicinal Purposes

African-American Slave Medicine offers a critical examination of how African-American slaves medical needs were addressed during the years before and surrounding the Civil War. Drawing upon ex-slave interviews conducted during the 1930s and 1940s by the Works Project Administration (WPA), Dr. Herbert C. Covey inventories many of the herbal, plant, and non-plant remedies used by African-American folk practitioners during slavery.

In Doctoring Freedom, Gretchen Long tells the stories of African Americans who fought for access to both medical care and medical education, showing the important relationship between medical practice and political identity. Working closely with antebellum medical journals, planters' diaries, agricultural publications, letters from wounded African American soldiers, WPA narratives, and military and Freedmen's Bureau reports, Long traces African Americans' political acts to secure medical care: their organizing mutual-aid societies, their petitions to the federal government, and, as a last resort, their founding of their own medical schools, hospitals, and professional organizations.

This book combines historical biography with a focus on the role of the practitioner in the folk health-care system, and ethnobotany, including a description of the active ingredients of the herbs used in African American herbal medicine. The contributions of European Colonial, American Indian, and African practices to the development of contemporary African American folk medicine are discussed. In addition to showing John Lee's approach to folk medicine, the volume provides descriptions and illustrations of the main herbs used. Folk Wisdom and Mother Wit provides a basic historical framework and background to the continuing viability of a folk medical system based on a pluralism combining biomedicine and traditional health care.

Widely regarded as the most comprehensive study of its kind, this volume offers valuable insight into the alleged medical differences between whites and blacks that translated as racial inferiority and were used to justify slavery and discrimination. In Medicine and Slavery, Todd L. Savitt evaluates the diet, hygiene, clothing, and living and working conditions of antebellum African Americans, slave and free, and analyzes the diseases and health conditions that afflicted them in urban areas, at industrial sites, and on plantations.  

This book lays out the movement of Hoodoo against a series of watershed changes in the American cultural landscape. Hazzard-Donald examines Hoodoo material culture, particularly the "High John the Conquer" root, which practitioners employ for a variety of spiritual uses. She also examines other facets of Hoodoo, including rituals of divination such as the "walking boy" and the "Ring Shout," a sacred dance of Hoodoo tradition that bears its corollaries today in the American Baptist churches. Throughout, Hazzard-Donald distinguishes between "Old tradition Black Belt Hoodoo" and commercially marketed forms that have been controlled, modified, and often fabricated by outsiders; this study focuses on the hidden system operating almost exclusively among African Americans in the Black spiritual underground.

This study re-evaluates the field known as Negro/Slave Medicine, which has traditionally focused on the efforts of slaveowners to provide medical care for their slaves, addressing the slaves' proactive management of medical care; brutality as a cause of the constant need for medical attention; and the health risks posed by arduous agricultural labor. This groundbreaking study offers insight into the health problems facing enslaved people, their attempts to deal with the causes and effects of illness and injury, and the slave owners' attitudes toward the medical treatment of slaves.