Main description:

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.