Thesis ID: CBB728296810

Pedagogies of the Black Body: Race and Medical Education in the Antebellum United States (2016)

unapi

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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Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB728296810/

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Authors & Contributors
Wailoo, Keith
Eric H. Walther
Mooney, Katherine C.
Cornelius-Diallo, Alexandra
Evans, Jazmin Antwynette
Muigai, Wangui
Concepts
African Americans
African Americans and science
Science and race
Slavery and slaves
Race
Black people
Time Periods
19th century
20th century
18th century
20th century, early
21st century
Places
United States
Atlantic world
Southern states (U.S.)
Atlantic Ocean
Scotland
New Zealand
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