Danish Colonial Health Policy and Practice on St. Croix, US Virgin Islands

Summary

During the period between 1803 and 1848, a series of medical hospitals were constructed on St. Croix, US Virgin Islands in order to provide medical services to enslaved individuals in an effort to reduce mortality and morbidity. My research seeks to interrogate how medical initiatives and treatments were implemented, contested, or received by various actors, including Danish colonial doctors and nurses, plantation health care providers, and enslaved individuals. This research will be operationalized through the excavation and analysis of archaeological materials from the plantation hospital at Estate Cane Garden, St Croix, which dates from the late 18th century to the beginning of the 20th century. This archaeological study will integrate archaeological materials, archival research, spatial analysis, and historical studies. The aims of this project are twofold; to serve as a case study for interrogating the impacts and negotiation of incipient Western medical policies and practices within the colonial context at plantation hospital sites, and to use this research as a means of developing a theoretical and methodological framework for identifying and studying hospital sites across various temporal and geographic scales, a subject of research that remains severely lacking in historical archaeology and within broader studies of medical institutions.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

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