(SLAVERY AND ABOLITION) Running account for a physicians wor

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(SLAVERY AND ABOLITION.) Running account for a physician's work on the enslaved people at a central Alabama cotton plantation. Manuscript document, 12 1/4 x 7 1/4 inches, signed by payee and a Justice of the Peace; folds, minor wear and soiling, excised from volume along one edge. Autauga County, AL, 30 January 1844

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Additional Details

Colonel John McNeil (circa 1780s-December 1843) owned cotton plantations in Autauga and Coosa Counties, Alabama. He was listed in the 1840 census for Nixburg, Coosa County as a man in his 50s with one younger white woman (apparently his orphaned niece) and 46 enslaved people. We can thus safely assume that the many patients named in this account were enslaved rather than family members. Dr. Joseph H. Vincent made 34 visits to the plantation between May and November 1843, before the Colonel's sudden death on 7 December. These visits are listed in excruciating detail: "opening abcess for boy," "blister plaster for Jaque," "drawing tooth for negro," "fitting truss on Silas," and more. The "bill to treatment of gonorrhea" may have been for the colonel, though. The running account was written in a ledger book, but cut out and submitted to the estate for payment, which was settled on 30 January 1844, when it was docketed on the second page.