Enslaved Doctors

Enslaved doctors were widely used in the Chesapeake region.  These practitioners tended to reside on the property of a planter who owned them.  Enslaved doctors were often preferred over— and sometimes recognized as better than— the white medical establishment because their powers as “conjurers” offered more measurable “psychological” comfort, as opposed to temporary “physical” relief in an environment that constantly delivered bodily pain.”[1] Using ancestral therapies that incorporated spiritual healing and natural herbs, the enslaved people working for George Mason IV relied on folk medicine to relieve and cure their ailments.[2]

An archaeological dig at Gunston Hall has unearthed small cylindrical patterns at some distance from the manor house.  One pit revealed a spiral configuration made from cobble stones, a design probably created by enslaved doctors who made and administered remedies. West African healers regarded circular arrangements as a symbol of universal benefit. In another larger pit, archaeologists uncovered a closely packed smooth rock formation. They surmise that a "ju-ju" man or woman—i.e., a healer of African descent—worked at this site. The historical evidence removed from this excavated ground includes a cowry shell (perhaps from West Africa), a Mason family bottle seal, and two pieces of petrified wood. Although there is no obvious indication of their immediate association, these collected items may have come from a conjurer’s kit, which contained the social and material influences of an Atlantic World created by the forced migrations of African people to the New World.[4]



[1]  Todd L. Savitt, Medicine and Slavery: The Diseases and Health Care of Blacks in Antebellum Virginia (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 125-126.  On Virginia plantations the health treatment extended to enslaved people created mistrust. “[A]ny injury or illness in the quarters that required some medical intervention inevitably raised perplexing issues of autonomy and control.  Sick slaves may often have turned first to self-help solicited in secret from local black healers . . . [and] [i]f these remedies proved ineffective, they still may have attempted to conceal illnesses as long as possible, rather than submit to whatever treatments and regimens the owner might administer or dictate”:  Lorena Walsh, From Calabar to Carter’s Grove: The History of a Virginia Slave Community (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997), 178.

[2] Philip Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake & Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 627-631.

[3] Personal communication with David Shonyo, Chief Archaeologist, Gunston Hall Plantation, Mason Neck, Virginia, July 2017. He also authored a valuable study examining 18th-century (African-American) healing practices in and around George Mason IV’s manor: David Shonyo, “March 2014 Report on 2013 Activities on Gunston Hall Plantation,” (44FX113), Gunston Hall Plantation.

[4] David Shonyo, “March 2014 Report on 2013 Activities on Gunston Hall Plantation,” (44FX113), Gunston Hall Plantation; John Thornton. African and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 206.

Creator: Farhaj Murshed