Abstract

This article proposes to study slavery through the analysis of a judicial document, usually less studied in the historiography: the redhibitory, or cancellation of sales of enslaved persons. I propose to show that, even when economic profit initially guided the redhibitory as a judicial remedy, the redhibitory put in context the relationship between owners, mistresses and slaves, daily work, the environment and the social group with which they shared and related. I am interested in highlighting the circumstances of slavery based on the vital experience of the disease, through redhibitory trials that accuse the vice of undeclared disease, and argue how this stressed and compromise this institution. I analyze a trial (1756-1758) in which María Francisca, an enslaved mulata, who experienced epileptic seizures, sometimes called “coral drop”, in the Santiago, General Captaincy of Chile.