“A Beautiful Spot for a Grave”

This chapter grapples with a number of issues associated with how diseases associated with the slave trade were perceived across the Atlantic world, and what ideas and methods were advised and devised to prevent their arrival and dissemination. It does so by focusing first on the ways in which authorities and individuals attempted to sanitize ecosystems, in order to reduce the threat that so-called pestilential environments, and second on their need to regulate human behavior so as to prevent the spread of these diseases. It also emphasizes that the decisions and policies featured throughout this chapter were influenced by discussions that took place all over the Atlantic world and beyond during the period.

Introduction

Of what strange nature is knowledge! It clings to the mind, when it has once seized on it, like a lichen to the rock. —Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus (uncensored 1818 edition) ON FEBRUARY 22, 1841, Dr. Thomas Nelson boarded a vessel that had just been escorted into the harbor of Guanabara by HMS ...