Aetiological Politics, Mental Illness, and Affective Neuroscience in British Slave Trade Abolition

The role of medical science, including testimony from medical practitioners during Britain’s parliamentary inquiry into the slave trade, has eluded sustained scrutiny in the historiography. Through a close reading of parliamentary hearings, doctors’ clinical reasoning, diagnostic practices, and therapeutic protocols emerge as key forensic evidence in the abolition movement. This article traces the politics of medical diagnosis by studying mental illnesses such as melancholia, hysteria, and insanity on British slave ships and as they were debated in parliament. Building upon the historiography of science in the context of British abolition, it offers a rereading of Britain’s slave trade debates by way of emergent eighteenth-century neuroscience, particularly the neurophysiology of feelings. I argue that evidence concerning the emotional capacity of African people was a key point of deliberation during parliamentary hearings and was embedded in a neuroscientific discourse that privileged idealized notions of British femininity. The article demonstrates how the diagnosis of mental illness overturned proto-racial theories of neurophysiology and the developing science of race, temporarily confirming the neurological fitness of African people. It concludes with the suggestion that these parliamentary disputes reveal the early racialization of mental healthcare with residual legacies in healthcare today.

Context (archaeology) · Historiography · Insanity · Mental health · Mental illness · Politics · Racialization · Scrutiny · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History of Emotions Research