How can African American medical traditions during slavery serve as a source of power today? Dr. Roberts’ talk explores how the enslaved used botanical knowledge, herbal therapies, and spirituality as a way to resist brutality, cure disease, and heal their communities. In the process, enslaved women and men contributed to early modern medicine and science.
Carolyn Roberts is an Assistant Professor at Yale University in History, History of Science and Medicine, and African American Studies. Dr. Roberts earned her MA and PhD from Harvard University and her BA from Dartmouth College. Roberts’ book project, To Heal and to Harm: Medicine, Knowledge, and Power in the Atlantic Slave Trade, explores the pharmaceutical and medical labor performed by a largely unknown group of African and British women and men, both enslaved and free. Her project uncovers how the slave trade pushed the boundaries of pharmacy, surgery, and natural history, and in the process remade medicine in the Atlantic world.
This January 30, 2019 science cafe program was the first of a series funded in part by a National Science Foundation grant (#1611953) whose principal investigator was Karen Rader, historian of science Virginia Commonwealth University’s College of Humanities and Sciences in Richmond, Virginia.
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