Seasoning and Abolition: Humoural Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic

This essay stresses the importance of the humoural medical tradition and its lay reiterations in popular eighteenth-century British works on slavery, abolition and illness. In particular, it examines the popular medical concept of seasoning and how contemporaries applied it to enslaved African bodies. Seasoning became a common talking point during the British abolition debate as both sides stressed different aspects of humoural theory to make their arguments. While numerous historians have used seasoning as an analytical term to explore the impact of movement on the enslaved, this essay rehabilitates its historical medical meaning and traces how abolition politics affected that meaning.