ABSTRACT
A focus on health consumerism highlights the extent to which consumption and modern economic and incipient scientific discourse intersected to shape health care practices in the antebellum South. The consumerism study examines the lives of enslaved laborers at Poplar Forest plantation from 1840 to 1861 within the broader context of the slave society of the American South in the antebellum period, defined as the period that began in 1820 with the Missouri Compromise and ended in 1861 with the outbreak of the Civil War. The presence of African American healers in 19th-century central Virginia was the result of generations of adapting African medicinal practices to incorporate European and Native American influences as well as adapting to new physical, social, and political environments. By the mid-19th century, proprietary medicines had become a major industry in the United States. They were marketed as cures for every imaginable ailment, including indigestion, colic, venereal disease, and cancer.
