Objective/Context:

Revisiting disease as a category of analysis characterized by its plasticity, while at the same time highlighting how it can help understand particularities of black slavery in late-colonial Chile. In particular, it seeks to appreciate how some ailments, or certain contexts in which they were revealed, expose conflicts between slaves and their owners, or between different masters, as well as certain limits of slavery, such as the difficulty in performing domestic chores.

Originality:

It highlights the analytical possibilities of disease as a category for understanding slavery resulting from the transatlantic trade in Chile, and underlines that it played a role in challenges to slavery, in some cases brought forward by enslaved people themselves.

Methodology:

This article is in dialogue with historiographies that place disease as a category, along with those that work on the history of Afro-descendant slavery. Various aspects of slavery are seen through the lens of thirty legal proceedings in which slaves appear with illnesses, injuries and ailments in the courts of justice of Santiago, at the time part of the General Captaincy of Chile, between 1740 and 1823.

Conclusions:

I argue that disease has a double plasticity, or two ways in which this particularity is revealed: one is the result of its elusive character, and the other is the product of how it was used in a particular judicial context by enslaved people, slave owners, and participants in related litigation. Furthermore, the plasticity of disease as a category exposes aspects of slavery as a system that implies the coercion of the enslaved body.

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