Chelsea Berry, Poisoned Relations: Healing, Power, and Contested Knowledge in the Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025) 273 pp. $49.95 Hb. ISBN: 9781512826494
Chelsea Berry’s work Poisoned Relations: Healing, Power, and Contested Knowledge in the Atlantic World is a deeply interdisciplinary study that reimagines how we understand poison, healing, and power in the context of slavery and the African diaspora. The book draws on an impressive archive of over 500 poisoning trials across four key Atlantic sites – Virginia, Bahia, Martinique, and the Dutch Guianas – from 1680 to 1850. Berry moves beyond the familiar framework of ‘poison as resistance’ to show that ideas of poison were far more complex, deeply rooted in both African and European cultural systems, and shaped by contested moral and political logics.
At the core of the book is the argument that poison, rather than being a universally understood biomedical substance or concept, was a culturally constructed and historically contingent category. While not denying the political and subversive uses of healing and poisoning practices, Berry argues that a singular focus on enslavers’ anxieties or resistance can reproduce colonial gaze. In the European context, poison was gendered and often associated with women as ‘weapons of the weak’ – tools of subversion, stealth, and illegitimate power. West Central African traditions, particularly those preserved in Bantu languages and philosophical idioms, linked poison to abuses of authority and spiritual imbalance. African-derived healers were not only figures of care and resistance; they could also be accused of misusing power within their communities. Poisoning, in Berry’s telling, was as much about intracommunal tensions and anxieties about morality as it was about confronting slavery’s violence.
The book’s methodological richness is one of its greatest strengths. Berry draws on a wide array of sources, including trial records, legal codes, correspondence, ethnographic writings, and linguistic data in multiple European and Africa languages. She uses comparative historical linguistics; especially Bantu roots such as -gàng- (to bind) and -dòg- (to curse or bewitch) to reconstruct deep African moral and political philosophies around healing and affliction. Berry treats language as a distinct historical archive, capable of revealing how Africans conceptualized power, vulnerability, and responsibility long before European colonization. In addition, her careful reading of court records points to the structural silences and coercions embedded in colonial archives while still attempting to recover the perspectives of enslaved and free Africans.
Structurally, Poisoned Relations unfolds in two parts. The first traces the intellectual histories of poison in pre-Atlantic Africa and Europe, illuminating their divergent ontologies and ethical systems. The second half turns to case studies from the Americas, exploring how these ideas collided, fused, or misfired in the colonial context. Each chapter explores a key theme: poison as resistance or betrayal; the emotional and bodily dynamics of taming and illness; the metaphor of binding in healing networks; the production of narratives about poison through trials, rumors, and rituals. Throughout, Berry shows how poison accusations were shaped not just by the enslavers’ fears but also by social conflicts within enslaved communities themselves. Enslaved people did not act in monolithic ways; they formed judgements, made diagnoses, accused others, and (mis)interpreted affliction through culturally specific lenses.
Rather than portraying healers as either subversive heroes or demonized scapegoats, Berry presents them as moral actors embedded in fraught social worlds. Also, she reframes our understanding of enslaved people as thinkers, and not merely victims or resisters. Berry challenges historians to move beyond binary readings of resistance and instead engage with the full complexity of African-descended thought and its adaptations in the Americas. The book makes a major contribution to the history of medicine by expanding its boundaries, thereby placing African healing practices on equal footing with European ones. Similarly, it advances African diaspora studies by refusing to treat the Middle Passage as a total rupture, but rather tracing continuity, translation, transformation in ideas about power and health.
Although the book inevitably relies on colonial sources, Berry is candid about the limitations of these materials through her concept of ‘constructed narratives’ and engagement with the anthropological idea of ‘dialogues of the deaf’ which could be considered as a framework for analyzing miscommunication and cross-cultural misunderstanding in trial settings. Berry’s reading of trial transcripts as performances further exposes an era that was shaped by fear and power. Also, the book teaches that legal cases can become not only sites of repression but also sites of negotiation, where multiple moral and intellectual worlds converged, even if imperfectly.
Ultimately, Poisoned Relations is not just a history of criminalized healing, it is a profound inquiry into how different cultures understood the moral implications of healing and harm, the responsibilities of those who held spiritual power, and the ways communities tried to diagnose affliction in the face of violence, mistrust, and uncertainty. Berry’s book is a needed contribution to the scholarship of slavery, African diaspora, medical humanities, legal anthropology, intellectual history, memory, and archival science.
Temitope Adetoyese, The University of Texas at Austin
