Todd L. Savitt’s book Medicine and slavery : the diseases and health care of Blacks in antebellum Virginia is a must read for anyone researching either slavery or medicine in the United State’s antebellum period. In spite of it being over thirty years old, it was originally published in 1981, it is the single most important work on the subject. Luckily for anyone doing research in that era on those subjects, or on medical care for working class whites, it is a very well researched and clearly written work.

The only books that come close to this work focus on the Caribbean, Kenneth Kiple’s The Caribbean Slave: A Biological Study and Richard Sheridan’s Doctors and Slaves: A Medical and Demographic History of Slavery in the British West Indies, 1680-1834. Both of these titles are also from the 1980s and, to the best of my knowledge, also have not been superseded. ( )