Yaws: Enslaved African and Indigenous cures

The World Health Organisation say this of Yaws.'Yaws forms part of a group of chronic bacterial infections commonly known as the endemic treponematoses.'

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/yaws

Yaws was a disease of concern in the Caribbean in the eighteenth century as it could cover an entire body in ulcerated sores. It was passed through physical contact and was most common amongst enslaved African labourers, especially those newly arrived on Plantations. If on the Middle Passage, they embarked without Yaws, the squalor of Plantation life almost certainly added to the chances of catching the dreadful disease.

On a plantation, if an enslaved worker had Yaws, then the suffer was segregated and placed in a Yaws hut, typically under the direction of elderly African enslaved woman who would act as both doctor and nurse. Very few European doctors would venture close to Yaws houses due to the fear of catching the disease which would cause ‘disgrace and ruin to any respectable white person contracting it’, and there are even cases of suicide by some who did accidentally find themselves affected. Although Yaws is primary contracted through touch, insects that lived in the overcrowded Yaws houses also passed the disease on, so even if a doctor was careful to avoid physical contact with a patient, it wouldn’t take much to get bitten.

The course of the disease varied, if there is no secondary infection someone could go weeks or months with no suffering, but it was possible for patients to have physical disfigurement and pain for years; with sores on the soles of the feet and palms of the hands.

Of course for the Planters in the Caribbean who claimed ownership over enslaved workers, this meant Yaws was costly and cures were important to find. Alexander Anderson grew several plants in the St Vincent Botanical Garden that were folk cures for Yaws.

Gardenia genipa is one plant that Anderson grew that was an Indigenous medicinal cure for Yaws. He wrote that ‘a Carrib chief in St Vincent told me the green fruit roasted or baked in an iron pot and applied was an effectual remedy for that disgusting & infectious disease the yaws’. He recorded that 'the fruit bruised & fryed in an iron pot and applied to yaws cures them'. It is unclear which of the two Indigenous groups then known as 'Black Carribs' (now Garifuna) and 'Yellow/Red Carribs' (now Kalinago) provided this information as he notes in his manuscripts plant uses from both.

Image from Plants of the World Online; https://powo.science.kew.org/taxon/urn:lsid:ipni.org:names:751331-1

But Gardenia genipa is just one of several plants Anderson records as curing Yaws. Other plants included Paullinia pinnata, known as Barbados Sucking Bottle, and Paullinia barbadusis; the roots of both plants were boiled with lime juice and iron rust and then applied externally to the sores.

Like pretty much all vernacular cures from the late eighteenth century, the quantities of plant material needed is sketchy, but there is good evidence that the use Indigenous and enslaved African plant medicines was effectual and some colonial experiments were conducted that proved this. In Richard Sheridon’s book on medical history in the British West Indies from 1680-1804, he noted that whilst European-descent doctors used mercury to cure Yaws, almost always unsuccessfully, African doctors could cure this highly contagious disease in a matter of weeks or months.

Dr William Hillary concurred. A Yorkshire Quaker and MD who went to Barbados in 1747 noted that one rarely caught the Yaws twice. He noted that ‘by long observation and experience, the disease can be cured ‘with the caustic juices’ of certain plants when applied externally, and by the juice or decoctions of other plants taken internally. He noted that these plants and their uses were kept secret from white folk, although interestingly Anderson did obtain several of these recipes.