An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa (1788) is Alexander Falconbridge's eyewitness testimony documenting the horrific conditions of the Atlantic slave trade based on his experiences as ship's surgeon on four slaving voyages. We have updated this timeless classic into a modern, updated translation that is easier to read! Written at the request of British abolitionists seeking factual evidence to support their parliamentary campaign against the trade, this concise yet devastating work systematically describes the procurement of enslaved Africans, Middle Passage conditions, mortality rates, and trade's corrupting effects on all involved, providing professional medical perspective on slavery's physical and moral devastation. Falconbridge methodically documents the slave trade's operations beginning with African coastal procurement involving European traders purchasing captives from African merchants and chiefs. He describes how slaves were obtained through warfare, kidnapping, and judicial processes corrupted by commercial incentives, with demand for captives encouraging violence and social disruption throughout affected regions. His account shows how European demand transformed African conflicts and legal systems, corrupting traditional practices through commercial pressures rewarding human trafficking. What distinguishes this testimony is Falconbridge's professional medical authority combined with direct observational experience, providing factual documentation that complemented moral arguments advanced by other abolitionists. Unlike purely humanitarian appeals or theoretical critiques, Falconbridge offers clinical descriptions of disease, mortality, physical suffering, and trade conditions from someone whose professional duties required detailed observation. His treatment carries particular weight because he profited from the trade before conscience led him to oppose it, lending credibility to testimony against his former economic interests. The work extensively describes Middle Passage conditions including extreme overcrowding with enslaved Africans packed into spaces barely allowing movement, inadequate ventilation causing suffocation and disease, insufficient food and water, violent suppression of resistance, sexual abuse of women, and calculated brutality maintaining submission. Falconbridge documents mortality rates averaging fifteen to twenty percent but sometimes reaching fifty percent or higher when disease swept through ships, with deaths resulting from dysentery, smallpox, depression, and despair alongside outright violence. Falconbridge particularly emphasizes the medical horrors he witnessed including gangrenous ulcers from chains and shackles, communicable diseases spreading rapidly in confined spaces, severe malnutrition and dehydration, and psychological trauma producing cataleptic states where captives refused food and essentially died of despair. His professional descriptions of physical suffering provide graphic evidence of trade's inhumanity while his medical authority made testimony difficult to dismiss as exaggeration. Author Biography Alexander Falconbridge (d. 1792) was a British surgeon and abolitionist whose firsthand testimony about the slave trade significantly contributed to the abolition campaign. After serving as ship's surgeon on four slaving voyages during the 1780s, Falconbridge became convinced of the trade's inhumanity and joined the abolitionist cause, providing crucial eyewitness evidence to parliamentary committees and writing his influential account. His professional medical training and direct experience gave his testimony particular credibility, with abolitionists like Thomas Clarkson extensively citing his observations.