Interview with Nursing Clio 2025 Honorable Mention Prizewinner Elise Mitchell
Nursing Clio’s 2025 Article Prize committee was thrilled to honor Elise Mitchell with an Honorable Mention for her article, “The ‘Practitioner of Physick and Surgery’ and the Enslaved ‘Doctor’: Medicine, Slavery, Race, and Patriarchy in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica,” The Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies (November 2024). The article brilliantly tells the stories of enslaved doctor Galen and Scottish doctor Alexander Johnston, exploring masculinities and medical knowledge in eighteenth-century Jamaica.[1] I was lucky enough to interview Elise about this amazing work and her contributions to our understanding of gender, health, and enslaved people in the Atlantic World.
Cara: Congratulations on receiving an honorable mention for Nursing Clio’s award for best article! Could you tell our readers more about your research interests in general?
Elise: Broadly, I’m interested in how early modern Africans and people of African descent attended to their health. I’m particularly fascinated by how they addressed health threats that had impacts on whole communities, such as epidemic diseases. My first book project, Morbid Geographies: Enslavement, Epidemics, and Embodiment in the Early Modern Atlantic World (under contract with Penn Press), focuses on how enslaved Africans understood smallpox, sought to redress epidemics, and contended with Euro-colonial public health policies and practices along their journeys to the early modern Caribbean. My second project, Remedies and Relations, is a microhistory focused on how enslaved and free Africans and people of African descent in eighteenth-century St. Ann, Jamaica, accessed healthcare. Galen and Johnston’s histories are central to this second project.
Cara: How did you come upon the stories of Scottish physician Alexander Johnston and the enslaved man he named Galen and described as a “doctor,” and why did you decide to make them the focus of this article?
Elise: In 2015, I was working on my first research paper for a graduate seminar and decided to visit the Historical Society of Pennsylvania to see Johnston’s papers. The finding aid indicated they dealt with Jamaica in the eighteenth century, and I was interested in researching the Caribbean before 1800. Philadelphia was a short bus ride from where I was living in Newark, NJ, and I had friends who lived in the city, so an extended stay was not an issue. When I called up Johnston’s records, I was astonished at how voluminous and detailed they were. Overwhelmed, I thought to myself, “Someone could write a book!” Then, I quickly narrowed my focus to his work inoculating enslaved people for smallpox, which was the focus of my research paper. I returned to Johnston’s archive several times during my graduate school career because smallpox inoculation became an important part of my dissertation. I also could not help but pay attention to other aspects of his record, references to Galen as “a Doctor,” references to free people of color. Later, when I was researching in the Jamaican National Archives, an archivist encouraged me to look at their collections of vestry minutes. One evening, as I was processing my notes, I realized that many of the free people of color listed in the vestry minutes were Johnston’s patients. This find made me begin to wonder if maybe the “someone” who “could write a book” was me. I felt I should test some of my ideas for book chapters out in conferences and workshops, so I submitted the story about Galen to a conference on Scotland’s colonial connections. When the organizers, Désha Amelia Osborne, Eloise Grey, and Matthew Lee, decided to pursue a special issue, I agreed, and the rest is history.
Cara: You do wonderful work recreating the life of Galen despite limited and problematic sources. Can you talk a bit about how you did this? How did you approach these sources?
Elise: Contending with archival silences and obfuscations is always tricky. In my experience, it’s best to expect them and greet them with a robust knowledge of existing historiography, methods specific to your historical subjects, and the willingness to read widely and omnivorously across the remaining archives that are relevant to the person or people you are writing about. There exists no archive of Galen; he’s not even mentioned in Johnston’s finding aid. But, reading Johnston’s records and other records about St. Ann with attention to what they do and what they do not say about Galen, while keeping in mind what I knew from the historiography about the roles enslaved medical assistants played, enabled me to recreate some glimpses of his life.
I approached Johnston’s archive and the Jamaican archives with a curiosity about the world in which they both lived. I tried to think deeply about the question Cedric Robinson poses in Black Marxism (1983), about enslaved people. He writes: “…the more authentic question was not whether the slaves (and the ex-slaves and their descendants) were human. It was, rather, just what sort of people they were . . . and could be.”[2] At the forefront of my mind when writing about Galen, was “what sort of person was he?” and “what sort of people was he surrounded by?” Pursuing those questions led me to write his story the way I did.
Cara: As you say in your article, historians have been paying more attention to the exchanges of healing knowledge in the early modern Atlantic World, and your article is an important contribution to this historiography. Your article explores the importance of networks, especially for medical practitioners, in Jamaica. Can you say more about those networks and how you came to center them in your story?
Elise: Recently, within the last two decades or so, we have seen a range of texts about the circulation of medical substances, knowledge, and practices. As a social and cultural historian of slavery and medicine, I want to know about the people. I am interested in applying the lessons we have learned from social and cultural histories of slavery and the slave trade to the history of medicine and slavery. In my work, I am more drawn to studying and historicizing the social relations and power dynamics that emerge in the context of medical treatment than I am to the treatments themselves. This necessarily brings me to thinking about social relations, social groups, and social networks and the power dynamics therein.
Cara: Are there any interesting tidbits that you couldn’t fit into the article?
Elise: There is so much that could not fit. This is why I decided my second book will be about the enslaved and free Africans and people of African descent in Johnston’s records. The people Galen and Johnston treated led rich and vibrant lives that are partially captured in Johnston’s archive. Reading his records alongside records in Jamaica and the U.K. exposed me to fascinating stories of their deft struggles to secure medical treatment for themselves and their families from Johnston and a whole range of other healers in St. Ann. I hesitate to share any more than that here – you’ll have to wait for the book!
Cara: Your forthcoming book, Morbid Geographies, links epidemics and enslavement with gender and embodiment. Can you tell us a bit more about how you conceptualized this project and how/why gender is central to it?
Elise: I came to that first project with the strong desire to write a sensory history of slavery and the slave trade. I was interested in how social and political status can manifest on and in the body. While beginning to research my dissertation, it became apparent that studying smallpox was one way to answer this question.
Enslaved Africans endured the slave trade and arrived in the Americas with complex understandings of how to treat smallpox and also ascribed significance to the disease. In broad terms, West and West Central Africans agreed that smallpox epidemics signaled social disarray and warranted political transformation. How they went about redressing social disarray and enacting political transformation varied greatly, as did the specifics of the kind of disarray it signaled. Nevertheless, smallpox, contagious flesh disorders, and epidemic disease more broadly were viewed as communal misfortunes of social and political consequence. After completing my dissertation, I realized that enslaved Africans were far more likely to encounter smallpox in the context of the slave trade than at any other point. The slave trade, viewed from the vantage point of the enslaved, was a process of social and political transformation – from subject to slave, a commodity and later property. What did it mean for people to experience smallpox amidst this transformation? I cannot answer that question fully, but it is the axis around which the first book rotates.
Gender is a crucial analytic for this intellectual endeavor. Kinship and reproduction were central to the making and unmaking of enslaved people’s political subjectivities. Gender is central to concepts of kinship and reproduction. As enslaved people endured public health interventions and recreated their healing practices in the Americas, they were very much concerned about kinship. Women’s labor and advocacy, particularly concerning the kinds of treatments to which their children were subjected, can be glimpsed in the records and has become an important part of the story I try to tell in Morbid Geographies.
Cara: What’s next for you on the research front?
I am currently wrapping up the archival research and in the early stages of drafting my second book project, Remedies and Relations. This book will be a microhistory focused on enslaved and free Africans and people of African descent in St. Ann, Jamaica, who received or refused medical treatments from Johnston. It will examine how enslaved and free people of African descent negotiated and contested Johnston’s power. It will also examine the ways these people cared for each other. In addition, I am working on a couple of articles about enslaved and free Black women healers in the early modern Atlantic World.
Notes
- Alexander Johnston emigrated to Jamaica in 1763 to practice medicine and build his career and professional networks. Through a patron, he was able to purchase several enslaved people, including a boy he named “Galen” and trained as a medical assistant. ↑
- Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism, Revised and updated third edition. (The University of North Carolina Press, 2020), 125. ↑
Featured image courtesy Leeloo The First.
Cara Delay, Associate Professor of History at the College of Charleston, holds degrees from Boston College and Brandeis University. Her research analyzes women, gender, and culture in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland, Britain, and the British Empire, with a particular focus on the history of reproduction, pregnancy, and childbirth. She has published in The Journal of British Studies, Lilith: A Feminist History Journal, Feminist Studies, Études Irlandaises, New Hibernia Review, and Éire-Ireland and written blogs for Nursing Clio and broadsheet.ie. Her co-edited volume Women, Reform, and Resistance in Ireland, 1850-1950, was published with Palgrave Macmillan in 2015, and her monograph on Irish women and the creation of modern Catholicism is forthcoming from Manchester University Press. At the College of Charleston, she teaches courses on women’s history and the history of birth and bodies.
Discover more from Nursing Clio
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
