The Medical Examination of Enslaved Persons Through the East and West Mediterranean Between the Fifteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.

The medical examination of slaves by early modern physicians and surgeons is a complex and, to date, under-researched area. Even though evidence of slave examination practices has been attested to ever since antiquity, specific criteria for physically examining slaves can first be found in mediaeval sources from regions in which the Arab cultural prevailed. Consequently, it has been falsely assumed that such practices were the exclusive domain of Arab medical practitioners. From the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries onwards, specific passages can be traced in medical texts from the Western cultural area in which the examination of slaves is described and criteria are mentioned. This article aims to provide an overview of those treatises focused on the act of buying and selling slaves in the Early Modern Period, concentrating primarily on treatises written by European authors. It equally sets out to reflect on how did those authors identified combine their own experience with the knowledge available to them about the examination of slaves.