The Negro and the Southern physician: a study of medical and racial attitudes 1800-1860.

ONE OF the first professional groups to study the Negro in America was the medical doctor. His conclusions, therefore, are a necessary adjunct to any analysis of American concepts of race and attitudes of racial inferiority. Racial attitudes, clothed in the authority of medical science, helped to suggest, justify, and dictate biological as well as social categories; indeed, medical science helped to explain and defend the prevailing social structure of early nineteenth-century America. The physician was in a peculiar position in America, a position which allowed him not only to study the Negro as a biological 'type' but to draw conclusions and elaborate theories on the basis of those findings. His medical studies of the Negro flourished in an atmosphere that had accepted the eighteenth century's hierarchical arrangement of the races of man. Medical conclusions, therefore, were fed as much from the framework of 'scientific' accumulations of the previous century as by the growing national consciousness of the American people. Medical science and early Southern nationalism, reinforcing each other in the thought of the physician, created a fictitious Negro type whose attributes were accepted as having real substance. The physician had a conception of himself as a free agent, operating within the bounds of a scientific certainty whose rational laws all but reinforced a 'social-scientific' organization of life. The decisive factor in the physician's medical prognosis was the extent to which science claimed a view of the world and life as a whole. His medicine, ironically, was as much an effort to define the 'American' as it was an effort to disabuse those elements in society whose racial characteristics were different from his own. Some diseases like Cachexia Africana (mal d'estomac), or dirt-eating, were thought peculiar only to the Negro because of his mental constitution. According to physician James Maxwell, writing in the Jamaica Physical Journal of 1835, dirt-eating had been a practice of many early civilizations, but restricted principally to the black races in the nineteenth century. The Greeks gave the name 'malacia' to the 'leucophlegmatic' condition of the skin of Greek youths who, desirous of becoming 'slender and effeminate', would devour quantities of clay. Among the South American Indians, the Otomac selected with great care 'a factunctious clay' coloured with iron oxide which they ate in 'prodigious quantities'. In Java a reddish clay was baked and sold in the public market for the purpose of making an individual 'thin and slender'.' The Chinese, too, wrote the traveller Medhurst, mixed quantities of gypsum into a