Medicine in the 1800’s The Pre-Civil War Era was a hard time in terms of disease and illness. Slaves in the time period used very different healing methods then free people in the country. Free people had access to doctors and had the money to pay for them. Slaves didn’t have that option when it came to disease and illness. To deal with illness, Slaves invented remedies for different symptoms. “But the two of us can still remember the pungent smell of the mustard plasters our grandmother prepared and put on our father’s chest to cure him of pneumonia” (Slave Medicine). Slaves dealt with illness and disease by themselves. For free people, especially those with good income, medical help was more available. They went to doctors for aid, and payed good money for it. Some people who had no doctor around or …show more content…
Even if you had money to pay for professional health care, finding a doctor in your area that could actually help you was very hard. This made health care your own responsibility. “According to eighty-year-old Julia King, whose thoughts are recorded in Slaves Remembered, “When the slaves got sick, the other slaves generally looked after them. They had white doctors, who took care of the families, and they looked after the slaves, too, but the slaves looked after each other when they got sick”” (Slave Medicine). Health care and nutrition manuals were written but they didn’t help in emergency situations. The knowledge they contained was unreliable and mostly opinions of their authors. In one of the manuals written by Doctor John Gunn, it suggests that you let blood out of a person’s head to treat Apoplexy (Plantation Medicine). The ideas in many medical books and manuals made no sense at all, but people had no other ideas on how to treat illness. The uncertainty in the medical field led to equal life spans for all people in the time