Christopher D. E. Willoughby is a historian of slavery and medicine in the United States and Atlantic World
Christopher D. E. Willoughby is a historian of slavery and medicine in the United States and Atlantic World
Description: John Collins Warren’s central position in 19th-century American medicine makes him an apt focus for studying the influence of racist theories on critical medical institutions, including the Journal. Specifically, we study how Warren incorporated racial thinking into medical education and local medical and natural history societies, along with how he supported racial theorists around the country.
Description: As this article argues, pioneer medical professors brought a specific racial worldview with them into western states like Kentucky. Specifically, I examine what these professors learned during their education back East; how they introduced and elaborated upon these ideas in the western medical schools they established, and how their students reproduced these ideas.
(2024) “Professors of Racial Medicine: Imperialism and Race in Nineteenth-Century United States Medical Schools.” Medical History. Volume 68, Special Issue 2. April 2024. 146-161. Access it here.
Description: This article examines some of the racist features of nineteenth-century medical school curricula in the United States and the imperial networks necessary to acquire the data and specimens that underpinned this part of medical education, which established hierarchies between human races and their relationship to the natural environment.
Description: We examine the afterlives of nineteenth-century racial theories of the mind and racialized forced “therapeutic” labor in contemporary approaches to incarcerating racialized minorities with mental health problems. In particular, we examine how racialized notions of madness and recovery affect the treatment of minoritized individuals by mental health workers and police today with sometimes deadly consequences.
Description: “Plantations as Landscapes of Medicine” examines how capitalism shaped plantation health as a concept and a lived reality. From diseases of commerce to industrial accidents, physicians treated the ailments of an increasingly capitalist form of agriculture. On the other hand, doctors often wrote about plantations through racial imaginaries of healthy workers and benevolent planters, serving as medical propagandists for the slavocracy.
Description: “A Harvard Physician’s Reports on an 1857 Visit to the Saamaka” is an annotated transcription of Harvard Comparative Anatomist Jeffries Wyman’s trip to Suriname in 1857. There, Wyman made (deeply-flawed) racial science observations about the local enslaved population, and his journal provides important insights into the everyday life of the Saamaka maroon community.
Description: “Running Away from Drapetomania” rethinks the antebellum New Orleans physician and enslaver Samuel A. Cartwright, arguing that understanding his ideas’ (and race science’s more generally) negative influence on American culture requires recognizing how this type of thinking was normative to American medicine in the nineteenth century.
Description: “His Native, Hot Country” relates how concepts of the environment changed over time in early American medical thought about race, explaining that by the time of the U.S. Civil War, physicians advocated for the white supremacist notion that people of African descent were healthiest under the condition of slave labor in the tropics.