Paternalistic Medicine

Slaves being inspected prior to sale.

Although bondsmen and bondswomen frequently acted as their own healers, plantation owners still took a “keen interest” in the medical treatment administered to enslaved labor. In the absence of professional doctors, slaveholders prescribed drugs of their own and sought to monitor sickness in the fields and quarters.  Indeed, the health of plantation workers in the 18^th century was vital to the production, stability, and prosperity of the master class. At times, enslaved people received the same care as the slaveholder’s family.^[1] In other instances, they were denied the expertise of a white practitioner and, instead, the master offered homemade remedies made from available natural sources.  This decision could upset the medical allopathic establishment in colonial Virginia.^[2] 

The “Mason Family Manuscript Account Book” lists three paid local doctors named James Craik, William Robertson, and John Elliott,^[3] all contemporaries of George Mason IV. James Craik inoculated patients for smallpox.^[4]  He may have administered this treatment to Mason family members and the enslaved people of Gunston Hall. We know that George Mason IV understood the need for such public health measures because he introduced a bill to the Virginia General Assembly in 1778 to regulate the cause and course of smallpox.^[5]   In fact, he inoculated his enslaved workers in 1792, the year he died. Some historians argues that knowledge of this preventive practice was first transmitted from enslaved Africans to American slaveowners such as the Puritan preacher Cotton Mather whose call for mass inoculation saved Boston from a smallpox epidemic in the early 1720s.^[6]