Doctors in a Slaveholding City: Professionalization and Complicity with Slaveowner Domination in São Luís do Maranhão, Brazil (Nineteenth Century)

This article examines the role of physicians in reinforcing structures of violence in the slaveholding society of nineteenth-century São Luís, Maranhão. Focusing on two cases, it shows how medical professionals collaborated with elite slaveholders, particularly Ana Rosa Viana Ribeiro and Carlos Fernando Ribeiro, in concealing the abuse, torture, and deaths of enslaved individuals. The study analyzes both the denial of medical care to the enslaved woman Carolina by Dr. Paulo Saulnier de Pierrelevée and the fabrication of forensic evidence by Dr. Antonio dos Santos Jacintho to cover up the murder of the enslaved boy Inocêncio. In Brazil, where medical institutions developed within the broader framework of slavery, such complicity was neither exceptional nor incidental. Rather than merely exposing tensions between scientific authority and the brutality of slavery, these cases reveal how medical legitimacy was used to justify violence and reinforce the impunity of the slaveholding class. Drawing on newspapers, police reports, court records, and forensic documents, the article demonstrates the complicity of medical discourse in sustaining enslavement and legitimizing its power.