Dr. Cartwright's diagnoses

In his “Report on the Disease of and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race,” originally addressed to the annual meeting of the Medical Association of Louisiana on March 12, 1851, Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright offers a description of several medical and/or mental conditions which, he claims, are exclusive to Negro slaves and to their ancestors in Africa. He describes the symptoms of these presumably hereditary conditions – drapetomania, for example, which he defines as “the disease causing slaves to run away,” and Disaesthesia Aethiopia, or dullness (“hebetude”) of mind or body –as physiological or anatomical “peculiarities” of the Negro race. While Dr. Cartwright’s theories have since been thoroughly discredited, they are often studied today as examples of the lengths to
which a “master race” will go in order to justify its existence. This assignment invites you to write a research essay in which you propose an alternative, “nurture”-based interpretation of the anecdotal data presented by Dr. Cartwright in defense of his “nature”-based arguments for the continuation of slavery. Specifically,
Write an essay in which you challenge Dr. Cartwright’s diagnoses – in other words, in which you propose alternative explanations and treatments for one or more of the symptoms and behaviors he describes in his report. In challenging Cartwright’s assumptions and conclusions, be sure to draw upon your understanding – based on the reading you’ve already done for the class, as well as from
the sources your own research turns up – of the situation of slaves and their masters in the pre-Civil War South.