| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1 | The History Cooperative

Sharla M. Fett. Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations. (Gender and American Culture.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2002. Pp. xiii, 290. Cloth $39.95, paper $18.95.
Health and medicine as an arena for social life under the slave system of the antebellum American South is the focus of Sharla M. Fett's thoroughly researched and persuasive study. In giving primary attention to how African-American slaves defined their own health and the means for protecting and restoring it, Fett's book contributes to an important shift in the historical understanding of slave sickness.	1
As in other fields within the history of medicine, the biomedical perspective held sway for a long time in the history of slave health. Historians such as Todd L. Savitt, Kenneth Kiple, Virginia Himmelsteib King, Richard Steckel, William Postell, and others gave primary attention to identifying and describing the disease entities that likely counted for much slave sickness. In this rich and still important historiography, slaves were seen largely in the aggregate, as populations at risk, and the parameters of their health were circumscribed by powers beyond their control: weather, diet, their owners' whims, and a general ignorance of infectious diseases.	. . .

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