African American Ethnomedicine (AAE)
Ethnomedicine broadly refers to the traditional medical practices of particular ethnic groups around the world and their cultural interpretation of health, diseases, and illness that addresses the healthcare process and healing practices.
Long before the advent of Western medicine, Africans had developed their own effective way of dealing with diseases, whether they had spiritual or physical causes. Enslaved Africans in America forcibly brought here arrived with this medical tradition.
Indeed, this African medical tradition was transplanted to Southern plantations becoming specifically known as ‘Rootwork’ a key component of a larger syncretic folk spiritual system known as ‘Hoodoo’. Rootwork represented Black health 'self-determination' and 'self-healing' that countered a massive sickness-producing white supremacy slave system.
Rootwork practitioners known as ‘Root-Doctors’ knowledge of medical botany ‘herbs’ was appropriated into southern medical knowledge; it spread throughout slave quarters and plantation hospitals creating a ‘dual-system’ of health care. Often African American Ethnomedicine practiced by Root-Doctors was more effective in treating the physical and psychological conditions of the enslaved than the medicine practiced by white doctors. In most cases the enslaved rarely saw white doctors - their health care was mostly neglected.
Root-Doctors were more than just herbalist addressing physical ailments, some were known as a “two-headed doctor” who were also psycho-emotional healers. This dual head was used to describe the individual who was more than a Rootworker or Conjurer (focused on cleanses and being possessed removals), they were both.
Two-headed doctors placed emphasis on removing the emotional distress of slavery trauma and negative patterning ‘internalized plantation dysfunction’; they understood that stress lowered ‘weakened’ the immune system of the body and left the enslaved vulnerable to disease and other problems; they also knew that stress permeated the body having to be released somatically through humming, hollering, singing, and dancing ‘shaking’.
Ethnomedicine broadly refers to the traditional medical practices of particular ethnic groups around the world and their cultural interpretation of health, diseases, and illness that addresses the healthcare process and healing practices.
Long before the advent of Western medicine, Africans had developed their own effective way of dealing with diseases, whether they had spiritual or physical causes. Enslaved Africans in America forcibly brought here arrived with this medical tradition.
Indeed, this African medical tradition was transplanted to Southern plantations becoming specifically known as ‘Rootwork’ a key component of a larger syncretic folk spiritual system known as ‘Hoodoo’. Rootwork represented Black health 'self-determination' and 'self-healing' that countered a massive sickness-producing white supremacy slave system.
Rootwork practitioners known as ‘Root-Doctors’ knowledge of medical botany ‘herbs’ was appropriated into southern medical knowledge; it spread throughout slave quarters and plantation hospitals creating a ‘dual-system’ of health care. Often African American Ethnomedicine practiced by Root-Doctors was more effective in treating the physical and psychological conditions of the enslaved than the medicine practiced by white doctors. In most cases the enslaved rarely saw white doctors - their health care was mostly neglected.
Root-Doctors were more than just herbalist addressing physical ailments, some were known as a “two-headed doctor” who were also psycho-emotional healers. This dual head was used to describe the individual who was more than a Rootworker or Conjurer (focused on cleanses and being possessed removals), they were both.
Two-headed doctors placed emphasis on removing the emotional distress of slavery trauma and negative patterning ‘internalized plantation dysfunction’; they understood that stress lowered ‘weakened’ the immune system of the body and left the enslaved vulnerable to disease and other problems; they also knew that stress permeated the body having to be released somatically through humming, hollering, singing, and dancing ‘shaking’.