Pain for Profit The Motivations of Slave Surgeons in the Eighteenth to Nineteenth Century Caribbean

Authors

Gabe Smock

Keywords

Middle Passage, slavery, Falconbridge, dysentery, human suffering

Abstract

When late eighteenth- century British surgeon Dr. Alexander Falconbridge ventured belowdecks to check on the hundreds of slaves chained there, he had no illusions about the horrors of the Middle Passage. After all, this was not his first voyage providing medical care for slaves until they disembarked at the infamous markets of colonial Kingston, Jamaica. He took a moment to brace himself, then ventured down into the damp air below only to encounter a sight so awful that it was difficult to put into words when he recounted the experience years later to Parliament. As a consequence of being packed in so tightly that they could not move, a wave of dysentery had ravaged the slaves, and Dr. Falconbridge’s medieval attempts at ameliorating the symptoms were completely impotent. The scene before his eyes was straight out of hell, with the entire deck covered in a thick layer of blood and diarrhea while hundreds of slaves wallowed in the collective filth and cried out for mercy. In Falconbridge’s own words, it looked like a human “slaughter-house.”1 Perhaps even worse was the fact that it would be another three months before the ship would reach terra firma, and Falconbridge was well aware that many would not survive to experience even the smallest reprieve of stepping off the ship. Hundreds of thousands of slaves perished in this way––pulled from their families, commodified, and eventually thrown into the sea to be eaten by the sharks that hungrily followed in the wake of slave ships.

Recommended Citation

Smock, Gabe (2024) "Pain for Profit The Motivations of Slave Surgeons in the Eighteenth to Nineteenth Century Caribbean," The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing: Vol. 53: Iss. 1, Article 6.
Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/thetean/vol53/iss1/6