This book explores the history of drug development and testing in the eighteenth-century Atlantic World, looking especially at whether slaves were exploited in human medical experiments at the time.
Londa Schiebinger is the John L. Hinds Professor of History of Science at Stanford University. She is the author of the award-winning Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (2004), among many other works.
"By studying the West Indies as a 'center of calculation', Schiebinger offers a methodological and ideological model for a historiography capable of beginning the hard work of building up an archive of medical history conscious of its own racial and political imperatives."