Illnesses Known and Hidden: Health Status and Slaves’ Legal Agency in 18th-Century Colombia

This paper extends existing scholarship on slaves’ agency and the social role of colonial medicine in Latin America by considering the ways that slaves’ health status and experiences of disability informed their search for justice. Taking eighteenth century Colombia (New Granada) as a case study, it examines the entanglement of legal and medical theorizing in the identification of “defects” among Afro-descendent slaves, in order to understand how the enslaved engaged disability and health status in their claims. I argue that enslaved people repurposed the legal and medical terminology that characterized them by racialized notions of bodily and behavioral deviance. Doing so, they intervened in debates –typically restricted to medical practitioners, slave owners, and juridical and religious authorities –in ways that complicated conceptions of their status as subject and property. Their experiences offer a unique lens for understanding alternative roles for the body in analyses of slave resistance and experiences of disability in the formation of Atlantic subjecthood.