The Disability History Association and the University of Illinois Press are pleased to announce the winner of the 2024 Outstanding Dissertation in Disability History Prize!

Linsey McMillan

“‘They Are Ultimately to Feel the Benefit of Change’: Enslaved Healthcare & Amelioration in Trinidad & British Guiana, 1780-1834”

Linsey McMillan was awarded a PhD in history from the University of Edinburgh in 2023.

“‘They are ultimately to feel the benefit of change’: Enslaved Healthcare and Amelioration in Trinidad and British Guiana, 1780-1834,” is a brilliant study of the socio-medical experiences of enslaved people in the final decades of British Caribbean slavery. Author Linsey McMillan focuses her attention on amelioration, a period of British Caribbean slavery characterized by colonial government and parliament-led initiatives to ‘ameliorate’ the condition of enslavement.

These efforts included legal measures aimed at reproducing the enslaved population through birth and improving the overall health of the enslaved population, which were all meant to ‘modernize’ and safeguard slavery from abolition. Dr. McMillan demonstrates that in this period of significant social, political, and cultural change, enslaved people continued to administer their own medicinal practices and to provide medical knowledge to their fellow bondspeople. Using the Reports of the Protectorate of Slaves, she examines enslaved people’s complaints of their everyday experiences of disease, chronic illness, disability, and reproduction. The editors were impressed with her methodological approach to these records, specifically McMillan’s ability to center the lived experiences of enslaved people in an archive steeped in the perspectives of white medical men. Her analysis reveals not only the failures of amelioration but also the ways disabled, injured, and ill enslaved people navigated enslavement and practiced health-care related resistance. Professor McMillan joins a growing body of scholarship on the historical intersection between disability and slavery, including The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America by Jenifer L. Barclay and Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean by Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy, which contributes to our understanding of how disability and ill health brought enslaved people in contact with slaveholding powers in contested and often violent ways.

More information on the Outstanding Dissertation in Disability History Prize here.

More information on the Disability Histories series here.

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Disability Histories seeks scholarship that explores the lived experiences of individuals and groups from a broad range of societies, cultures, time periods, and geographic locations, who either identified as disabled or were considered by the dominant culture to be disabled.