Colonial bodies, hygiene and abolitionist politics in eighteenth-century France.

Abstract

This essay explores the reactions of the French physicians and social commentators in the 18th century to the health experiences of the European and African slave populations in the French West Indies. Specifically it seeks to delineate the extent to which physicians utilized categories of race and class and concepts of pollution and purity to explain the incidence of diseases among Europeans and Africans within the Caribbean tropics. It is noted that towards the close of the 18th century physicians and school commentators drew upon health and hygiene to reinforce specific social agendas in Europe. These two factors encouraged the active separation and segregation between social classes. In contrast such a discourse reflected both the powerful class and racial boundaries within the Antilles colonies. With regard to the Caribbean slave population physicians speculated that their predisposition towards the plethora of pathogenic entities indicated that either the African body was innately predisposed to sickness or that institutions and the tropical surroundings facilitated the occurrence of disease. However on the eve of the French Revolution abolitionist writers believed that the disciplinary functions of dietary and hygienic regimen remained the major tenets for assimilating the potentially liberated African slave.