"The African Has No Stamina in His Constitution": The Production of Race, Ethnicity, and Medical "Knowledge" in the Reports of British Doctors on the Island of Saint Helena in the Late 1840s

In the mid nineteenth century the Atlantic island of Saint Helena served as a temporary settlement for Africans taken from illegally operating slave ships by the British navy. Saint Helena became an important site of both cultural encounter between the Africans themselves and their British rescuers. In particular, the management of the Liberated African Establishment produced an intense dialogue around the specific subject of African physical and nutritional well-being.  Medical care and feeding at Saint Helena, however proved challenging and "a great mortality" prevailed among the refugees. Regarding the scope of that mortality, scholars have described the recently excavated graveyard of thousands of people as by far the largest and most significant burial site connected to the Atlantic trade.  (Pearson et. al., 2011)  This paper examines the extensive and detailed reports generated by two successive Medical Officers seeking to address this mortality. The reports include descriptions of specific measures taken in caring for the Africans, listing and analysis of individual diseases suffered, and itemized attempts to reply to numerous hypotheses and in effect allegations about the causes of the mortality.  These elaborate tables, columns and enumerated notes were circulated within the Colonial Office and eventually laid before Parliament.  These reports provide rich terrain for exploring British physical and medical ideas about Africans, often focused on questions of supposedly innate physical and mental characteristics; and culturally contingent ideas about food and health.  Further, the reports themselves betray an elaborate attempt on the part of the authors—and subsequent official purveyors of the documents--to systemize, or at least present the appearance of systemization, in an evolving medical profession, and an emerging post-slavery British colonialism, in this case focused on a population whose perceived biological, social and cultural otherness had challenged the boundaries of European knowledge, understanding and values for over three centuries.