Christopher D. E. Willoughby is a historian of slavery and medicine in the United States and Atlantic World
Masters of Health
Medical science in antebellum America was organized around a paradox: it presumed African Americans to be less than human yet still human enough to be viable as experimental subjects, as cadavers, and for use in the training of medical students. By taking a hard look at the racial ideas of both northern and southern medical schools, Christopher D. E. Willoughby reveals that racist ideas were not external to the medical profession but fundamental to medical knowledge.
In this history of racial thinking and slavery in American medical schools, the founders and early faculty of these schools emerge as singularly influential proponents of white supremacist racial science. They pushed an understanding of race influenced by the theory of polygenesis—that each race was created separately and as different species—which they supported by training students to collect and measure human skulls from around the world. Medical students came to see themselves as masters of Black people's bodies through stealing Black people’s corpses, experimenting on enslaved people, and practicing distinctive therapeutics on Black patients. In documenting these practices <i>Masters of Health</i> charts the rise of racist theories in U.S. medical schools, throwing new light on the extensive legacies of slavery in modern medicine.
Reviews and Praise
This book is a meticulous autopsy of a ghoulish intellectual scandal. In this disturbing history of medical schools in the United States, we learn how debates over slavery, nature, and the origin of humankind played out on suffering bodies and desecrated corpses, and imbued racist thought into the management of medicine. Willoughby is a talented storyteller with the moral gravity of an Old Testament orator. At stake here may be nothing less than the scholarly salvation of American healthcare.
—Vincent Brown, author of The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery
With innovative archival research on the writings of medical students, Willoughby brilliantly illuminates how ideas about Black anatomical difference found an intellectual home in medical schools, becoming foundational to US medical culture, pedagogy, and practice and to the politics of slavery, global capitalism, and imperialism. Willoughby provides a crucial lesson for grappling with racism in medicine today: we must trace its persistence not so much to the racist doctors who built the medical profession, but more to the way racist ideas grounded the medical profession’s development. Masters of Health is essential reading for understanding medicine’s enduring entanglements with slavery and for efforts to eliminate their afterlives in medicine today.
-Dorothy Roberts, author of Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century
In his new book, Masters of Health, historian Christopher Willoughby suggests that this failure might be rooted in medical education’s long tradition of perpetuating and reifying precisely such racial ideologies… Little about Masters of Health makes for easy reading, but it is a text that those who have finished medical school—and those aspiring to enter it—should read with care and attention.
-Suman Seth, Science, November 3, 2022. Read the entire review here.
Crucial reading for historians as well as physicians, this book shifts historical attention away from the South and slavery to explore how the so-called benevolent and free North was equally culpable in the exploitation of black bodies. Highlighting the importance of imperial expansion and transnational cultural infusions to the evolution of American medicine, Willoughby intricately illustrates the wider Atlantic origins of professional medicine in America.
-Sasha D. Turner, author of Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica
An original, fascinating, and convincing book that takes us far beyond the standard narrative of race and medicine in America. Through deep immersion into archival sources, Masters of Health significantly reshapes our understanding of the role of antebellum U.S. medical education in producing white supremacy.
-Sharla M. Fett, author of Recaptured Africans: Surviving Slave Ships, Detention, and Dislocation in the Final Years of the Slave Trade
This book unquestionably deserves a wide audience and hopefully becomes required reading in medical schools. For, as scholars such as Vanessa Northington Gamble have long made clear in their teaching and research, and Willoughby aptly notes in the book’s introduction, “studying the history of medical education and slavery is also a route to demystifying racial thinking and unveiling its fundamentally flawed nature”.
-Stephen C. Kenny, The Journal of Social History, https://academic.oup.com/jsh/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jsh/shad052/7248891?searchresult=1
This book is essential reading for historians of medicine and slavery and will benefit physicians, nurses, and medical educators. Willoughby’s intertwined depiction of the rise of American medical education and race science makes an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the development of American medicine.
-Jonathan Jones, The Civil War Monitor. Read it here.
Masters of Health is an important book, building on an emerging body of work focused on exploring the centrality of medicine to the construction of ideas about race in the nineteenth-century United States, the perpetuation of race-based slavery, and the expansion of capitalism throughout the nation.
Felicity Turner, Journal of Southern History. Read it here.
As many institutions examine their relationships to slavery and its legacies, including the impact of racial science on contemporary medical care, Masters of Health will be an important resource to readers interested in the history of the university, the history of medicine, and intellectual history. The book also raises important implications for medical and scientific education, including the ways in which contemporary professional training continues to include biological notions of race.
-Natalie Shibley, Race and Early American Medical Schools: Review of Christopher D.E. Willoughby’s Masters of Health: Racial Science and Slavery in U.S. Medical Schools, Nursing Clio, Read it here.
Readers and researchers interested in the history of medicine and medical education in the United States and their deep connections to scientific racism, monogenism, and polygenism will find Willoughby's book to be highly thought-provoking and timely in understanding the history of U.S. medical schools and curriculum and its disconcerting past.
-Raymond Pun, The Watermark, Read it here.
In Masters of Health, the author, Christopher D. E. Willoughby, notably demonstrates how slavery and antebellum racist thinking underwrote the professionalisation of medicine.
-Maria Elena Indelicato, Social History of Medicine, Read it here.
Masters of Health makes an important contribution by outlining how pre-Civil War–era American medical teaching and the post-Civil War shape of the discipline had much in common. As such, this work forms a key foundation on which assessments of how these theories of racial difference and hierarchy have embedded themselves within the modern medical curriculum, and medical research practices can build.
-Rebecca Martin, The British Journal of the History of Science. Read it here.