“Some Yankee Non-sense About Humanity”: Hiding away African Health in Early American Fiction

Abstract

We have seen in the foregoing chapters how fictional medical encounters chart out a map of social relations among early Americans. In this chapter, we will see how they relegate African Americans to another map altogether. Depictions of the physical well-being and medical treatment of enslaved and free Africans in the early American novel describe a form of health and healing that is nearly devoid of social affection. The novels discussed thus far have chronicled a movement away from concepts of health and medicine that are grounded in ties of community and toward a self-interested, market driven form of medicine.