A University of Penn Medical School graduate, Dr. Samuel Adolphus Cartwright, who was a psychologist and surgeon in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama publicly announced precisely 172 years ago on March 17, 1851 the discovery of what he called “Drapetomania,” which he described as a disease that makes enslaved Blacks want to escape or otherwise resist.
On that date, Dr. Cartwright, as the chairman of a Louisiana State Medical Association committee that researched diseases supposedly unique to Black people, presented at the association’s annual convention a paper entitled, “A Report on the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race.”
Afterward, the paper was published in the monthly “DeBow’s Review,” a widely circulated agricultural industry magazine throughout the South. As reported by “The Atlantic” in its June 2014 edition, “DeBow’s Review” was known prior to the Civil War as the magazine that “recommended the best practices for wringing profits from ‘slaves.’ ”
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