Date/Time
Monday
9 Dec 2024
3:30 pm - 4:30 pm

Location
3335 Dwinelle Hall

Event Type
Non-CSTMS Event

Dr. Hannah Murphy
Director of the Center for Early Modern Studies, King's College London

Hannah Murphy will discuss her paper which examines the racialised epistemologies of the Transatlantic Slave Trade through a focus on the practice and process of medical ‘inspection’. Early travel accounts, eye-witness reporting, and abolitionist condemnations all testify to the ubiquity of the practice of inspection, in which a medical practitioner examined an imprisoned person to testify to their fitness. Such inspections took place in multiple sites and at different stages of enslavement. The complexity, scope and number of times an enslaved person passed through this process changed over the course of the early modern period, as the scope and scale of medical involvement and medical expertise changed too.

While records of inspection might suggest a greater system of bureaucratization, abstraction and quantification, its practice reveals a far more haphazard, interpersonal and embodied set of processes. I argue these were central to a form of medical expertise that was not predicated on curing, but on observing, surveilling, and classifying, and should, in turn, be understood as central to the making of slavery.

Professor Jonathan Sheehan will be a presenter during this talk.