As the NULab Coordinator, I began collaborating with Liberty Collard on developing a digital mapping exhibit for the Mapping Black London (MBL) project. The exhibit aims to compare, contrast, and connect histories of Black medical knowledge and religious communities across time and space. By layering several maps of race, religion, and medicine, the project will detail the local histories of London and Boston during the smallpox vaccination movement in the early 1800s and the cholera epidemics of 1832, 1849, and 1866. Although this project is currently still in development, this blog post details how the project emerged, emerging themes, and next steps.
Background: How the project came to be
One of my first classes at Northeastern as an English Master’s student was Professor Nicole Aljoe’s Black Digital Humanities graduate course in the fall of 2024. For my final project for the course, I examined the digital archives of the Boston Inoculation Controversy of 1721 and proposed interventions that could be applied to recenter the revolutionary medical contributions of enslaved people. It was also during that course that I learned about the Mapping Black London (MBL) project that Professor Aljoe co-leads with Professor Oliver Ayers. The MBL project uses digital tools to “recenter and recover the presence of people of colour” within the history of London’s development as a city.
During the summer of 2025, I visited London and explored local archives on the nineteenth-century cholera epidemics as part of my MA thesis work. My thesis, “A Rhetoric of Calmness: Struggling for Moral and Medical Authority in the U.S. Nineteenth-Century Cholera Epidemics,” examined moral narratives of health during the cholera epidemics to better understand the influence of non-medical voices on the public imagination of health and disease. While there, I also met with the Mapping Black London team, including Liberty, Odile Jordan, and Professor Ayers. We visited the London Archives together, viewing documents related to William Sancho’s activities in early modern medical movements and relevant parish records. William Sancho, son of Ignatius Sancho, worked as secretary for the Vaccine Pock Institute in Soho, and as Liberty and Professor Ayer’s work reveals, he was “deeply embedded within the country’s burgeoning entrepreneurial, literate, male-dominated, metropolitan and imperially-focused public sphere” (Cambridge Element 2026). For example, one document we looked at was of a drawing of an “Interior view of two customers, Martin Folkes and Addison, from an earlier acquaint of 1720, after Hogarth.” On the backside, text describes the Thatched House Tavern as a popular meeting place for several clubs. The tavern marks an important location in our mapping that connects William Sancho, and his work at the Vaccine Pock Institute, with the wider social scene of London. As Libby and Professor Ayers’ previous research points to, Sancho advertised a ticketed dinner at the tavern in 1801 as part of his work for the Institute (Morning Chronicle, 22 June 1801). Understanding the social environment with this archival record was helpful to our thinking about the ways in which Black Londoners contributed to medical and moral discussions at such places.
I also spent some time independently at the archives of the Wellcome Collection and at the Oxford Bodleian Libraries’ special collections, looking at religious sermons, maps, political cartoons, and other materials related to the nineteenth-century cholera epidemics. While sharing the details of my thesis project and early findings from my archive visits during a team meeting, including the role of religious sermons in public health conversations, the MBL team and I began drawing connections between the moral narratives around health in the early to mid-nineteenth century. Considering these overlapping themes of religion and health, we discussed William Sancho’s contributions to the medical and scientific community and his involvement in local Black parishes might showcase the overlap in knowledge production across medical and non-medical spheres. We also began brainstorming the ways in which mapping could help draw geographic connections between the medical and religious conversations of the different periods and the role of Black Londoners in each as they moved across medical and social circles. For example, the Soho community played a central role in both the smallpox vaccination movement and in John Snow’s water-born theory of cholera in 1854.
In September, Libby, Odile, and Professor Ayers visited Boston, and we explored Harvard’s archives at the Houghton Library. We were able to view a copy of Cotillions, &c, composed by Ignatius Sancho and printed in 1776. The most eye-catching page was the title page where an abundance of vegetation and foliage surrounds the title and obscures the publisher’s information. There also appears a corpse-like figure, camouflaged into the greenery with only their face emerging from the leaves as if a floating mask, and an instrument laying above their head.
Early findings and emerging themes
Bringing all of these archival trips together, we began collecting locations related to race, religion, and health across the half century and the Atlantic. We’re interested in overlaying the central sites of the eighteenth-century smallpox vaccination debates and the nineteenth-century cholera epidemics and linking these events across London and Boston. Although in early stages of mapping and analyzing our findings, the following themes and ideas are emerging:
- Disease & Race: Considering the role of religion and medicine as institutions, the forces of colonization that constructed racialized categories, and the scientific and medical knowledge of Black Londoners and Bostonians.
- Disease & Religion: Recognizing the role of moral arguments around inoculation, smallpox vaccination, and responses to the cholera epidemics to either champion and support medical knowledge or portray diseases as just punishments from God.
- Medical Knowledge, Race, & Religion: Exploring these histories within the context of the moment to better understand the strategies employed by Black community members such as Sancho to gain authority in conversations of health and morality.
- Mapping: Utilizing mapping as a decolonial/anti-colonial research tool to uncover Black presence in the archive where records have been previously hidden and to link their influence to wider networks of moral and medical discourse.
Next steps
As next steps for this project, Liberty and I will be mapping our collected locations in an ArcGIS StoryMap. We will create a digital exhibit with several interactive maps that when layered together display connections between the early and mid-nineteenth century, across continents, and among medical, religious, and social circles. We hope that by considering these conversations of disease prevention and religion simultaneously we can better understand these historical debates as evidence of Black Londoners and Bostonians’ role in knowledge production more generally. While situated in the early days of the modern-day medical profession, this study aims to consider questions of authority that remain relevant to this day. What influence does religion hold over matters of health, vaccination, and communal wellbeing? What sources of medical knowledge are trusted? And who is able to voice their opinions in these public debates?
