Doctoring Freedom: The Politics of African American Medical Care in Slavery and Emancipation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this well-researched and engagingly written book, Gretchen Long explores the significance of medical care as an expression of freedom and independence for African Americans in the context of slavery, war, and emancipation. According to Long, African Americans recognized that healthcare and the control of their bodies were crucial for securing and finding meaning in freedom. To make her case, she examines the intersection of cultural attitudes, differing medical systems, pseudo-scientific ideas about the black body, and conflicts between alternative sects and modern medicine. It is within these contexts, Long argues, that African Americans defined their personhood, political rights, and cultural place in American society. Long's first chapters recount health and medicine in slavery and the different ways the African American body was understood by slave owners and to a lesser extent by leading abolitionists. She focuses on the cultural connections between medicine and dependency, racial ideology and medical practice, and medical and political ideas to demonstrate the diverse ways the black body was manipulated. In newspapers and works of fiction, abolitionists articulated a vision of the black body as noble but broken and abused. In contrast, slaveholders wrote long justifications for slavery, which routinely emphasized that slaves were healthy and well cared for, but also dependent and physiologically less fit for freedom. The two views, while dissimilar, both contained a political message. African Americans offered yet another perspective, relying on their own healing practices, which were grounded in an understanding of their body which differed from their white owners. In the process, African Americans developed a sense of community that centered on control of the body; this focus on the body shaped their expectations of freedom and citizenship.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".