ABSTRACT
The medical management of enslaved Africans was important business to the individual slaveowners and to the slaveocracy itself. From the very beginning, slaveowners took a serious interest in the medical management of enslaved Africans. Many Louisiana physicians kept residential practices on the plantations of the largest slaveowners. Others eked out an existence as physicians on-call for emergencies. With the various types of injuries and illnesses that Africans suffered it was inevitable that they should spend time in either a plantation or city hospital or infirmary. New Orleans possessed a number of hospitals and infirmaries including: Charity Hospital, Franklin Infirmary, The Circus Street Infirmary and the Orleans Infirmary among others. From approximately 1862 to 1869 the hospital closed to keep the Union army from appropriating it during and after the Civil War; the hospital reopened after the Civil War.
