It was enslaved women who supplied the bulk of the daily nursing work on plantations. Some received their training from white doctors. When Clara Walker was thirteen years old, her “mistress” sent her to a doctor “who learned me how to be a midwife” over five years during her enslavement in Arkansas. Clara “made a lot o’ money for old miss,” delivering white and Black children.[5] Few received such apprenticeships. Treatments, practices, and beliefs were passed down from older community members, and enslaved women merged African, Caribbean, Indigenous, and European medical knowledge in their work. Women were particularly renowned for their expertise in the reproductive realm, and “grannies” and midwives helped to manage pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing within the “female slave network.”[6] As skilled medical practitioners, and nurturing caregivers, enslaved women were highly valued in their families and communities. Bacchus White conveyed enslaved people’s conviction in their female healers: “anything Aunt Judy couldn’t do ‘hit won’t wurth doin’.”[7] Enslaved women sustained life, eased pains, and healed.
Whites, on the other hand, found themselves reliant on the medical skills of enslaved people but skeptical of – or reluctant to recognize – their abilities. They often characterized enslaved women as superstitious, uninformed, and injurious. Enslaved people’s expertise troubled racist constructions of African Americans’ intellectual capacities, and slaveholders’ denigration and recognition went hand-in-hand. In Georgia in the 1830s, for instance, plantation mistress Fanny Kemble debased enslaved people’s medicine as the “simple remedies” of “ignorant” “savages,” yet noted these were “generally approved by experience, and sometimes condescendingly adopted by science” and physicians.[8] The work of nurses was also the “fatiguing, repetitive, and dirty” work of caring for the sick, and thus, as historian Sharla Fett writes, enslaved people’s roles in healthcare exhibited “contradictions between skill and servitude.”[9]
In slaveholding households, nursing was equally expansive and beset with contradictions. Enslaved women performed elder-care, nursed white women through childbirth, and cared for those suffering all manners of disease and injury. Enslaved women fed and washed patients, administered medicines, dressed wounds, and changed beds. In the domestic realm “nurse” was a noun, as well as a verb, and commonly referred to an enslaved person who cared for white children. These nurses were chosen from slaveholders’ existing laborers, or women could be bought or hired explicitly for this work. They watched, fed, bathed, dressed, held and played with children, and cared for them in illness. Enslaved women’s experience and talents were valued by their enslavers. White women remarked on their children’s affection for their Black caregivers, and their abilities to soothe fretful babies.