Sick from Freedom First Reading

With reading the first few chapters from Sick with Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction, it was fairly easy to make connections between this book and what we have talked and read about in class. The major connection that I made was how the Introduction of the book used the phrase "transformed his body into a commodity" which is one of the points we took into detail during class (Downs, p.3). We went into further detail of how black bodies were, for the most part, used as a type of currency. This translated into the economy being at a great high because slaves were part of the economy being sold and bought.  Along with black bodies being used as commodity, the bodies were used for medical purposed such as dissections. The reasoning behind this is that many black people were invisible with having no legal records and when buried the bodies would just be dumped into pits along other bodies (Downs, p. 27).
However, with black bodies being commodities, people did not take care of them. When families went north to get help from the Union, most families ended up with children or women dying because no one was willing to give them medical attention. As mentioned in the book, one "freedwoman" had her dying son, asked the captain of the camp for help, didn't get any, and her son died a few hours later (Downs, p. 42). This goes to show that even though black bodies were commodities, no one would go out of their way to help and leave the people to die.