“Supermen”: British Military Surgeons and the Forging of Ideas about the Black Body, 1795–1840

Between the founding of the West India Regiments in 1795 through to the consolidation of the force into just two regiments in 1825, nearly a hundred military surgeons were posted to serve in the West Indies. These men had just one responsibility: to provide medical care to soldiers so that the army had sufficient fit and healthy troops when they were needed. The men of the West India Regiments turned out to be a source of constant fascination for white regimental surgeons in the early nineteenth century. Few of those posted to serve in the Caribbean would have had extensive prior experience of working on those of African descent, and their new posting would involve interpreting and reinterpreting black bodies, as well as determining and navigating differences with white bodies, both real and imagined. In their writings, both private and published, surgeons overwhelmingly described the black male body in positive terms. The men were seemingly immune to tropic fevers, they marched and fought in sweltering heat without flagging, and they recovered from wounds more quickly than white troops. They even possessed super-senses, particularly eyesight and hearing. The positivity of surgeons attached to the West India Regiments however, was not the principal legacy of their writings. Rather it was their confirmation that black bodies were fundamentally and permanently different from white bodies. Their writings would be used, later in the nineteenth century, as a means of ‘proving’ that innate biological differences between black and white people existed.