Willoughby, Christopher D. E. (Author)
Sparks, Randy J. (Advisor)
This dissertation explores medical schools as a key site for the production and distribution of the scientific race concept in the United States from the late colonial period up to the U.S. Civil War. Utilizing primary sources including medical student theses, lecture notes, and a variety of print sources, this project argues that medical students learned a distinct vision of the black body through medical pedagogy. In the northern colonies, medical schools created the template for exploiting enslaved bodies. Similarly, professors and their students helped construct a nascent white male professional identity, based upon attending medical schools, reading medical journals, and analyzing black bodies. During the antebellum period, the number of medical schools increased, and the relationship between medical and racial theory grew stronger. Medical and racial theory became entangled at three levels in medical education. First, medical professors discussed theories of the origin(s) of the human races in their classes. Second, medical and racial theories maintained a mutual relationship of influence in subjects including anatomy, disease transmission, and environmental health. Third, students approached African American patients in ways that reinforced their inferior social and supposed biological status, specifically in cases of dissection, experimentation, and plantation practice. Through life-threatening and non-therapeutic experiments, medical students treated African American patients as existing between animal test subjects and white humanity—a sort of medical chattel principle. Finally, during the antebellum period, the medical profession attempted to gain authority in American culture by staking a claim as biological arbiters over the meaning of blackness.
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Thesis
Kristi M. Simon;
(2018)
The Controversy Surrounding Slave Insanity: The Diagnosis, Treatment and Lived Experience of Mentally Ill Slaves in the Antebellum South
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Book
Long, Margaret Geneva;
(2012)
Doctoring Freedom: The Politics of African American Medical Care in Slavery and Emancipation
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Thesis
Savannah L. Williamson;
(2016)
Caring for Human Property: A Medical Biography of American Slavery, 1808-1865
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Book
Downs, Jim;
(2012)
Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction
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Book
Dain, Bruce R.;
(2002)
A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic
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Book
Slaton, Amy E.;
(2010)
Race, Rigor, and Selectivity in U.S. Engineering: The History of an Occupational Color Line
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Rana A. Hogarth;
(2017)
Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840
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Book
Wailoo, Keith;
(2011)
How Cancer Crossed the Color Line
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Article
Watkins, Rachel J.;
(2013)
Biohistorical Narratives of Racial Difference in the American Negro: Notes toward a Nuanced History of American Physical Anthropology
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Book
Zumwalt, Rosemary Lévy;
Willis, William Shedrick;
(2008)
Franz Boas and W. E. B. Du Bois at Atlanta University, 1906
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Article
Young, Terence;
(2009)
“A Contradiction in Democratic Government”: W. J. Trent, Jr., and the Struggle to Desegregate National Park Campgrounds
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Book
Curran, Andrew S.;
(2011)
The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment
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Book
Smith, Kimberly K.;
(2007)
African American Environmental Thought: Foundations
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Thesis
Wangui Monica Muigai;
(2017)
An Awful Gladness: African American Experiences of Infant Death from Slavery to the Great Migration
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Article
Emily West;
R. J. Knight;
(2017)
Mothers' Milk: Slavery, Wet-Nursing, and Black and White Women in the Antebellum South
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Thesis
Jazmin Antwynette Evans;
(2019)
Scientific Racism's Role in the Social Thought of African Intellectual, Moral, and Physical Inferiority
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Thesis
Alexandra Cornelius-Diallo;
(2006)
“More Approximate to the Animal”: Africana Resistance and the Scientific War Against Black Humanity in Mid-Nineteenth Century America
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Article
Rusert, Britt;
(2013)
Delany's Comet: Fugitive Science and the Speculative Imaginary of Emancipation
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Book
Cerami, Charles C.;
Silverstein, Robert M.;
(2002)
Benjamin Banneker: Surveyor, Astronomer, Publisher, Patriot
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Book
Kilcup, Karen L;
(2013)
Fallen Forests: Emotion, Embodiment, and Ethics in American Women's Environmental Writing, 1781--1924
(/isis/citation/CBB001420306/)
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