Across the slaveholding South, many physicians and self-described healers create businesses focused on promising they can "cure" and "heal" enslaved Black people in order to get them back into the fields as quickly as possible.

One example is Drs. Henderson and Nash of Mississippi, who build a business specific to working with enslaved people. The guarantee “a cure in all cases of Scrofula, sore leg, Wens, Piles, Tetters, Coughs, fistula, Annigoiter, Carbuncle, rheumatism, Dyspepsia, Dropsy.” Establishing a "Negro Infirmary," they promise to “buy all young negroes that are afflicted with any one of the above named diseases... or will take them and cure them without any further expense to the owner than getting them to us” (Kenny, 2009).

These businesses emerge throughout the 1840s and 1850s.