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Running Away from Drapetomania: Samuel A. Cartwright, Medicine, and Race in the Antebellum South
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Running Away from Drapetomania: Samuel A. Cartwright, Medicine, and Race in the Antebellum South
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Journal Article
Running Away from Drapetomania: Samuel A. Cartwright, Medicine, and Race in the Antebellum South
2018
Overview
In 1940, Mary Louise Marshall, then the librarian of Tulane University's Matas Medical Library, wrote an article that has shaped the historical understanding of Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright. Though Cartwright was a prominent physician and medical writer in antebellum New Orleans, historians mostly remember him for his theories of drapetomania-the disease that caused slaves to run away; rascality-the disease that made slaves commit petty offenses; and dysaesthesia ethiopica-which made slaves \"insensible and indifferent to punishment.\"1 Published in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal, Marshall's biography of the southern physician seeded the ground for a mythology of Cartwright that has helped define him in the historiography of race and medicine. According to Marshall, Cartwright studied under the country' s most famous doctor, founding father Benjamin Rush, first as an apprentice and then at the University of Pennsylvania, but never completed the degree. With this pedigree, Cartwright appeared to be on the path to becoming a leading physician in the United States. Marshall explained that later in his career Cartwright served as \"Professor of Diseases of the Negro\" in the Medical Department of the University of Louisiana (now Tulane University). The fact is that no record exists of Cartwright at the University of Pennsylvania, which means he certainly never received a degree from that institution.
