The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 106, July 2002 - April, 2003 Page: 646
675 p. : ill. (some col.), maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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646 Southwestern Historical Quarterly April
Here Fett emphasizes slaves' "relational" understanding of self-health over and
against slaveholders' depictions of slave health in terms of their "soundness" for
labor and reproduction. The second part of the book explores how conflicts be-
tween slave and slaveholder perceptions of health played out, especially with re-
gard to the doctoring practices of enslaved women. Throughout her study, Fett
reiterates that while blacks at times benefited from white healing traditions and
whites from black doctoring, both groups nevertheless distrusted each other's
medical advice and practices, for both felt vulnerable to healers' potentially "sin-
ister intentions" (p. i68).
Fett ambitiously tackles several key aspects of plantation medicine at once: the
interracial dynamics of plantation healthcare, connections between health and
healing and slave spirituality, and the ways in which ideologies of race and gen-
der imbued black and white notions of health and medicine, to name just a few.
Consideration of so many complicated factors could easily result in a confusing
or unfocused study, but Fett's clear prose and good organizational sense make
the book a pleasure to read, for historians of American medicine, slave relations,
gender and slave religion alike. Indeed, her conception of the multifaceted and
interrelated aspects, and her cogent presentation thereof, offer a fuller vision of
slave life on plantations than a strict gender, medical or religious history could
do. Workzng Cures in fact offers an incisive and nuanced case for the inseparability
of gender, slave health, and slave religion, demonstrating how a tension rather
than dualistic separatism between male and female, spirit and body, sacred and
profane, and individual and community, informed every facet of slave life.
Claremont Graduate Unzverszty Fay Botham
The Story of North Texas: From Texas Normal College, 189o, to the Unzversity of North
Texas System, 2002. By James L. Rogers. (Denton: University of North Texas
Press, 2oo2. Pp. ix+736. Illustrations, foreword, acknowledgments, notes, in-
dex. ISBN 1-57441-128-4. $37-95, cloth.)
The author of this volume has been affiliated with the University of North
Texas for almost fifty years, having variously served the school as a professor of
journalism, vice president of administrative affairs, director of university plan-
ning, and, in his retirement, as the writer of this book. This survey history of the
school is an update to an earlier volume by Professor Rogers published in the
mid-196os under the title The Story of North Texas: From Texas Normal College,
89o, to North Texas State University, 1965 (Denton: North Texas State University,
1965). The current study, incorporating in its first 275 pages almost the entire
1965 book, adds approximately twenty chapters and several appendices in order
to bring the story of the university up to the present day. Rogers is uniquely suit-
ed to this task since he had personal involvement in many of the events about
which he writes in the latter chapters while he enjoyed unfettered access to
records of the institution. The author provides a thorough administrative history
of the school, beginning with its existence as a private normal in the 189os. He
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 106, July 2002 - April, 2003, periodical, 2003; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101223/m1/724/?rotate=180: accessed April 26, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.