Sharla M. Fett
Sharla M. Fett is an American historian of slavery and medicine whose 2002 book Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations documented the healing culture enslaved African Americans built and sustained on plantations in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. In the encyclopaedia she serves as a lead specialist for the antebellum-American plantation cluster of the gender, race, and colonial historiography tier, alongside deirdre-cooper-owens and pablo-f-gomez.
Life and Position
Biographical particulars (training, current academic appointment) are not present in the evidence cards drawn from her own monograph and have been left for later editorial fill. [TODO: insert academic affiliation, training, and current title from external source.]
Argument of Working Cures
Fett’s central thesis is that enslaved African Americans were not passive victims of medicine but cultivated a rich health culture with their own practitioners, therapies, and botanical expertise.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002) Plantation slave communities maintained a relational vision of health that connected individual well-being to broader community relationships, ancestral ties, and spiritual revelation, and this vision diverged from the slaveholder concept of “soundness.”(Fett, Sharla M., 2002) Within enslaved communities a culture of healing not organised around the market value of slave bodies provided a resource for survival, resistance, and community building.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002)
The book’s first analytical move is to take seriously what slaveholders and their physicians meant by soundness. Soundness was the dominant white slaveholder definition of slave health, measuring an enslaved person’s capacity to labour, reproduce, and obey, directly tied to market value.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002) The “chattel principle”, the reduction of enslaved persons to property, permeated every dimension of slave health, from auction yards to plantation sickhouses.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002) White doctors did not stand outside this market; they were active participants, examining enslaved bodies and issuing certificates of soundness in slave sales, courtrooms, and insurance transactions.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002) Soundness was not only a physical category: it extended to mental and moral assessments, and buyers interpreted scars and marks as evidence of defiant character as much as of past illness, meaning the objectification of Black health under slavery was a matter of minds and personalities as well as bodies subjected to market valuations.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002) Fett also shows the countervailing intelligence of enslaved people within this system: some manipulated the concept of soundness to discourage buyers and forestall separation from family, claiming illness or hidden defects to make themselves appear unsound to prospective purchasers.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002)
Against the soundness regime, Fett documents the African American pharmocosm. Drawing on Theophus Smith’s term, she shows how enslaved African Americans inhabited a world in which healing and harming were dual aspects of spiritual power, not opposing moral forces but simultaneous capacities whose ambiguity was taken for granted within African American conjuring culture.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002)(Fett, Sharla M., 2002) This is a methodological move as well as a historical description: by refusing to sort healing from harming into a good/evil binary, Fett frames the pharmocosm on its own cosmological terms rather than assimilating it to a secular-rational therapeutic framework.
One white response to that framework was the ideology of “superstition.” Some physicians went further than mere condescension: A. P. Merrill in 1856 described African American “superstitious fear” as a characteristic of the “negro race,” and a medical student named William McCaa even characterized Black belief in supernatural agencies as a “disease of the mind,” pathologising the spiritual knowledge system itself.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002) Yet the rhetoric of superstition concealed a more ambivalent practice: despite publicly dismissing Black healers, some white southerners privately consulted African American conjurers and diviners for illness, advice on property disputes, and other pressing matters, revealing the gap between public ideology and actual recourse.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002)
Practitioners grounded their authority in spiritual calling, divine revelation, ancestral wisdom, and dreams, a system of legitimacy that white professional credentials could not access or discredit on medical grounds.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002) Within enslaved communities, elders carried particular weight: while age devalued an enslaved person in the marketplace, it was a significant foundation of authority among Black healers, because the elderly were honoured for their learning and, for some, represented the closest living link to Africa, their spiritual potency increasing as death brought them closer to the ancestors.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002) African American healing traditions drew on Igbo, Yoruba, Bambara, Kongo, and other African healing systems transformed under New World conditions, and on Native American and European elements as well.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002) The Kongo cosmogram, for instance, informed African American ritual: art historian Robert Farris Thompson’s analysis of crosslike marks and forked sticks as cosmograms ties slave-quarter practice to a documented West Central African cosmology.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002)
Fett’s chapter on “Spirit and Power” also makes an explicit methodological distinction about what kind of power is at stake. Drawing on Ivan Karp’s work on African conceptions of power, she argues that African American healing under slavery reflected a definition of power not as control over people and resources (the Weberian sense White sociologists tended to impose) but as spiritual energy and the capacity to create, transform, and renew social life — a conception she calls more “dynamic” in Karp’s own phrasing.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002) This distinction shapes her analysis throughout: it is why enslaved healers can be understood as agents of transformation rather than merely as subordinate practitioners operating within limits set by slaveholders.
Fett gives a granular account of plantation herbalism and conjure. Southern herbal medicine was characterised by high cross-cultural exchange across lines of race, ethnicity, class, and region, with remedies borrowed, purchased, and stolen.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002) African American herbal practice was a sophisticated body of knowledge requiring identification of plants at various stages of growth, knowledge of timing and lunar cycles, selection of specific plant parts, and appropriate dosing, far exceeding the “empiricist rote memory” that white doctors dismissively attributed to Black herbalists.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002) Conjuration (hoodoo, rootwork) was the African American doctoring art that most explicitly expressed the relational vision of health: conjure narratives followed a four-stage structure of conflict, affliction, search for a conjure doctor, and divination/cure, placing illness within dense webs of community relationships.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002) Divination, Fett argues, was a “way of knowing” grounded in African epistemology, exposing the social origins of affliction and addressing not just bodily symptoms but underlying community conflicts.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002)
The political stakes of the book are explicit. The persistent practice of African American doctoring on southern plantations was a constant reminder that slaveholder power over Black bodies was only partial, and conjuring narratives repeatedly affirmed the pharmocosm as a realm outside white medical and slaveholder control.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002) The history of Black distrust of white medicine has rational origins in three centuries of medical abuse, from slave-trade inspections through Tuskegee.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002) Slavery distorted the physician-patient dyad into a three-way relationship among patient, physician, and slaveholder, in which the enslaved person’s interests were structurally subordinated to the slaveholder’s economic calculations.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002) Fett traces these dynamics into the postbellum era: white narratives rationalized slaveholder supervision by characterizing formerly enslaved people as “natural children of superstition” who rejected medicine for “charms and witchcraft,” confounding the spiritual basis of healing authority with ignorance and racial inferiority.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002) Against these white narratives of dependency, African Americans with direct memories of slavery emphasized a collective ethic of self-reliance in healing that drew on fireside training, pooled resources, and creative improvisation, requiring confidence in the legitimacy of African American medical traditions.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002)
Plantation midwifery and women’s healing work get sustained attention. Enslaved women occupied a central role as healers, herbalists, and midwives in both Black and white households, yet were denied the moral authority granted to white domestic healers.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002) White antebellum society organised medical authority around two poles, white women’s maternal domestic authority and white men’s professional training, both of which were systematically denied to enslaved women, requiring Black healers to construct a third category grounded in spiritual empowerment and community recognition.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002) Within enslaved communities, older women healers held authority based on spiritual empowerment, elder respect, and herbal expertise, criteria not recognised by planters, while in slaveholders’ ledgers the same women were rated at the lowest market values.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002)
A final theme is the strategic intelligence of the enslaved patient. Feigned illness was a widespread and strategic form of resistance, operating through the trickster tradition in enslaved oral culture, exploiting the diagnostic uncertainty that slaveholders and physicians could never fully resolve.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002) White southerners adopted an experimental attitude toward medical knowledge, seeking effective medicines and skilled practitioners across lines of social division, even as legal structures curtailed the practice of enslaved doctors.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002)
Methodology
Fett’s methodological commitment is meaning-centred and explicitly anti-superstition. She rejects a framework that posits some African American healing beliefs as “superstition” and others as “medicine,” and instead undertakes a meaning-centred analysis rooted in the social, cultural, and political significance of healing.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002) White slaveholders, she shows, used the concept of “superstition” as a racial ideology to discredit Black healers, conflating race, religion, and medical competence in a single dismissal.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002) Refusing to repeat that dismissal in scholarly form is one of the book’s structural commitments.
The geographic focus is four southeastern Atlantic states, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, chosen for their mature plantation economies and multigenerational slave communities.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002) The evidence base is wide: antebellum slave narratives, Works Progress Administration interviews conducted between 1920 and 1940, herbal and folklore collections, planter records, and physical artifacts (medicine bowls, birthing beads, conjure kits) recovered from southern plantation sites.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002) The orthodox antebellum medical profession, she argues, was characterised by therapeutic confusion and a medical counterculture, with regular doctors seeking professional legitimacy partly by denigrating enslaved and domestic healers as “old women, root doctors, and quacks of all sorts.”(Fett, Sharla M., 2002)
Place in the Encyclopaedia
The encyclopaedia uses Working Cures as the lead source for plantation healing in the U.S. South: soundness as a slaveholder construct, conjure and hoodoo, the African American pharmocosm, plantation midwifery, the Kongo cosmogram in slave-quarter practice, and the chattel principle’s grip on the doctor-patient relationship. Her work sits alongside deirdre-cooper-owens‘s Medical Bondage and pablo-f-gomez‘s The Experiential Caribbean as the third leg of the gender/race/colonial historiography tier, focused on the antebellum U.S. plantation South.
See Also
- african-diaspora-healing
- ritual-healing
- non-elite-healing
- soundness
- conjure
- hoodoo
- colonial-medicine
- deirdre-cooper-owens
- pablo-f-gomez