On the Treatment and Management of the More Common West-India Diseases, 1750-1802 - by J Edward Hutson (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

This work brings together, in one volume, a number of monographs from the mid to late eighteenth century (the period known as the Age of Reason) on the diagnosis and treatment of diseases of African and Creole slaves in the English-speaking Caribbean. Included here are James Grainger's Essay on the More Common West-Indian Diseases (1764) and book 4 of The Sugar-Cane (1764); book 2 of the Reverend Griffith Hughes's Natural History of the Island of Barbados (1750); and Benjamin Moseley's Miscellaneous Medical Observations (1789).

These monographs have been all but forgotten; however, they are of importance to scholars. Dr Hutson provides a fully annotated text that explains archaic terminology, makes medical, botanical and Latin terminology accessible to non-specialists in those fields, and provides useful explanations of eighteenth-century medical concepts. This fascinating collection has much to offer historians and health-care professionals, as well as general readers with an interest in the West Indies.

Review Quotes

"This volume will provide a treasury of source material for the study of medical history in the Caribbean. It comes 250 years after Hughes, Hillary, Moseley and Grainger were first published, yet so much of their writing resonates today. We must be grateful to Dr Hutson, who, like Dr Grainger before him, has taken 'liberal pains in the Notes . . . to enlarge knowledge of the medicinal . . . plants of the West Indies'." - Henry S. Fraser, University of the West Indies, Barbados