This work bring together in one volume a number of late-eighteenth-century monographs (the period known as the Age of Reason) on the diagnosis and treatment of diseases in African and creole slaves in the English-speaking Caribbean. These works have been almost forgotten, but they are of importance to many scholars, and Hutson provides a fully annotated text which explains archaic terminology, makes medical, botanical and Latin terminology accessible to non-specialists in those fields, and provides useful explanations of the eighteenth-century medical concepts.

Observations on the Changes of the Air and the Concomitant Epidemical Diseases in the Island of Barbadoes was first published in 1759 in London. Remarkably, a third edition was published in Philadelphia in 1812, with praise and annotations by the most famous American physician, Dr. Benjamin Rush, and with good reason. It is certainly the first comprehensive documentation of an epidemiological nature, in English, in the Caribbean, and justifies the title 'first Caribbean epidemiologist' for Dr Hillary. He made rigourous observations and clear deductions that have stood the test of time...