Not much is known about the early life of Cuba Cornwallis, one of the most famous Caribbean healers in 18th and 19th century. She might have been born into slavery, or she might have been captured in Africa and sold into slavery as an older child or adult. What is known is that at some point she was owned by, and then manumitted by, Captain William Cornwallis, in Port Royal Jamaica.
Personally, I think she was an African woman enslaved and brought to Jamaica for three reasons. First, Port Royal was a hub of the transatlantic slave trade and was filled with recently kidnapped men and women. Secondly, she was known as an Obeah woman, the West African term for a healer. Thirdly, she appears to be an expert on West African healing practices and it seems more likely she learned those skills in Africa. However, this is all speculative and it could be reasonably argued that learned these techniques from her mother or a grandmother after she was born into slavery in Jamaica.
Regardless of Cuba’s birth origin, she was an expert healer and top-notch Obeah woman. After Cornwallis freed her (she may have saved his life in illness, or she may have been his ‘lover’ – although an enslaved woman has no autonomy so a more fitting term for Cornwallis would have been her ‘rapist’), she retained his last name (as was customary) and opened a small hospital/convalesce home to practice as a ‘doctoress’. She soon became famous for her healing throughout the Caribbean. Everyone knew that Cuba Cornwallis was a woman skilled enough to bring her patients back from the brink of death, and there was so much respect for her that she became renowned as the ‘Queen of Kingston’.
Thus, it was natural when Captain Horatio Nelson, future Admiral and hero of Britain, came down with what was probably dysentery (complicated by malaria) during a mission to Nicaragua in 1780, his commander-in-chief, Admiral Peter Parker, would bring him to Cuba for treatment. Dysentery still kills hundreds of thousands of people every year in the modern era, and its mortality rate in the 18th century was catastrophic. Nonetheless, Cuba was able to save many victims of the disease – including an eternally grateful Nelson.
Nor was Nelson the only high-ranking Brit to owe his life to Cuba Cornwallis. She treated the future King William IV while he was on naval deployment in the area in the late 1780s, saving him from the many tropical ‘fevers’ that killed so many sailors during that time period. The king never forgot the care Cuba lavished on him, and when he recounted the Obeah woman’s treatment of his illnesses to his wife, Queen Adelaide, she was so moved she sent Cuba Cornwallis a beautiful gown as a token of her thanks 30 years afterwards. Ironically, King William – in spite of knowing firsthand how intelligent black people could be – remained pro-slavery with the argument that slavery was ‘good’ for the animalistic people of African decent.
What makes King Williams stance doubly ironic is that the treatments Cuba Cornwallis used to save his life were undoubtedly African in origin. Regardless if how ethnocentric Western history has erroneously presented Africa and its people as less technologically advanced than Europe (funny how those narratives always seemed to forgot that Egypt was an African country), the truth of it is that African medical practice often outstripped and outpaced Western medicine.
For one thing, the people in Uganda and Rwanda seem to have been performing successful cesarean sections for decades before it became a common practice for European and Western physicians.
In 1879, for example, one British traveller, R.W. Felkin, witnessed cesarean section performed by Ugandans. The healer used banana wine to semi-intoxicate the woman and to cleanse his hands and her abdomen prior to surgery. He used a midline incision and applied cautery to minimize hemorrhaging. He massaged the uterus to make it contract but did not suture it; the abdominal wound was pinned with iron needles and dressed with a paste prepared from roots. The patient recovered well, and Felkin concluded that this technique was well-developed and had clearly been employed for a long time. Similar reports come from Rwanda, where botanical preparations were also used to anesthetize the patient and promote wound healing.
Thus the traditional healers of Africa were sterilizing their hands and using medical soap and to tackle surgical infections at a time when Western practitioners threw a doctor into prison for suggesting they should wash their hands before operations. After colonization, hygiene in traditional African health practices took a hit (due to the suppression of knowledge transmission and a lack of access to clean water), but when Cuba Cornwallis was alive traditional African healers and their descendants knew the value of clean water and good food.
Although Cuba probably saved the lives of Horatio Nelson and Prince William as much through good hygiene as any other treatment, she did have African-recognized herbal medicines available to her, including the kapok ( AKA white cotton tree).
The kapok is indigenous to tropical West Africa as well as South America and the Caribbean, so a woman trained as an Obeah would have been familiar with its uses. There are several medicinal uses of the tree which could be used to treat dysentery and yellow fever. Tisanes made from the bark and/or roots of the kapok of are effective in stopping diarrhea and intestinal distress, while a decoction of the tree’s leaves is effective against fevers. Kapok bark would have certainly been better for the patients than the bloodletting and mercury contemporary Western physicians would have used to treat the same illnesses.
Cuba Cornwallis and the African-descended healers like her should be remembered and honored for their contributions to both history and medicine, but I’m sad to say that Cuba is remembered more as a footnote in Horatio Nelson’s biographies than for her own accomplishments. If that doesn’t say something about history being too often centered around white men to the exclusion of women and people of color, I don’t know what does.