ABSTRACT
The slave plantation complex of Havana and its environs during the first four-fifths of the nineteenth century was an infernal agro-industrial system that ran on a labour system characterized by suffering, violence, torture, and premature death; physicians and surgeons were important components in its reproduction. With the end of slavery in the British Caribbean in the 1830s, Cuba would inherit some of the neighbouring islands’ doctors. The nexus of plantation medicine and metropolitan medical science and professionalism unraveled as slavery withered in Cuba between 1868 and the final stage of emancipation in 1886. The symbiosis of criollo medicine and the slave plantation had laid strong roots that would continue to sustain the Cuban medical complex after the abolition of slavery in the 1880s, and the War of Independence of 1895—1898. The nineteenth-century Caribbean is characterized as a “laboratory of modernity” due to its contribution to the “development of imperial technologies that fueled successive waves of European expansion into the tropics.
