Slavery, Health & Disease: Historical Analysis

• The regular life, hygienic conditions, freedom from dissipation and excitement, steady and healthful employment, enforced self restraint, freedom from care and responsibility, the plain wholesome nourishing food, comfortable clothing, and open-air life acted as preventive measures against mental breakdown in the negro.

Diagnosis: Freedom

• In 1867, Peter Bryce admitted a former slave of his, and the very next year a hypervigilant forty-five-year-old ex-slave named John Patterson was brought for treatment.
• Patterson was clearly manic, possessed of an unfocused energetic furor that Bryce had encountered often.
• Patterson possessed neither the intelligence nor the judgment to do had proved too great, and Patterson had sunk into madness.
• Because Bryce meticulously documented the course of Patterson's mental illness over the previous dozen years, but Patterson had been free for only five, pressures of freedom could not have caused his illness.
• Bryce had the weight of medical research behind him.
• Washington, D.C., had 6,152 freed black in 1800.
• By 1860, free blacks outnumbered black slaves by more than three to one.
• The deaths of fifty-seven whites in Virginia's 1831 Nat Turner revolt radiated shock waves and engendered desperately repressive legislation throughout the slaveholding South.
• By 1840, even more was at stake, because the burgeoning ranks of blacks upped the ante in an all-or-nothing game of social Darwinism.
• Mulatoos would outbreed whites causing them not to be differentiated and "whiteness" losing its meaning
• Whites would go to "white negro exhibits" to get the "frisson" of revulsion.
• The most oft-articulated articulator of this "frail mulatto" theory Josiah Nott.
• Nott explained that mulatto's were an infertile, weak species, who died at a younger age than did whites and whose progency were born feeble.
• Legal minds scaled the mountain of constitutional support for slavery; philosophers expounded upon the "natural law" that made blacks inherently subservient to whites; and spiritual leaders cited reams of biblical and moral sanctions for enslavement.
• Scientific theories of racial inferiority had strongly informed the entire nation's medical perception of African Americans as befitting for slavery.
• By the 1840s, the North's industrialized economy no longer depended upon cheap southern labor.
• The nation had become a lonely Western trafficker in human chattel.
• In this contentious climate, the sixth U.S. census (of 1840) began enumerating whites and free and enslaved blacks.

Racism by Numbers

• Of the seventeen million Americans, three million were black.
• Free blacks suffered far worse health, especially far worse mental health.
• The document seemed the very model of objectivity, offering dense orderly rows and columns of numbers collected by census takers without salient bias.
• Census data consistently documented how free blacks died sooner and suffered dramatically higher rates from every known disease, including tuberculosis, malaria, pellagra, and the final stages of syphilis.
• The census also revealed high rates of miscarriage and infant mortality among free blacks that in turn were ascribed to blacks' higher rate of sex- ual immorality and sexually transmitted disease.
• The North and South held equivalent rates of "insane and idiot" whites but not of mentally defective blacks.
• One out of every 1,558 blacks in the South was an "idiot or insane", while 1 out of every 144 northern had similar mental problems
• Mental defects were eleven times more common among blacks in the North than among slaves.
• This data boosted pro-slavery arguments
• Blacks lacked the mature judgment of whites and were unable to resist the allure of liquor, indiscriminate sex, constant dancing, and frequent fighting
• Medical case histories described how blacks almost starved after spending their money on wine and tobacco or fell ill with tuberculosis after buying flashy clothes that were completely un-suitable for cold northern weather.
• Black's fertility had also fallen, allegedly because they were murderously indifferent mothers and absent fathers in the best of circum-stances
• Without white intervention, black children had even less of a chance at life than their parents.
• Concerns for blacks and whites caused methods such as racial segregation.
• During the census marshals were told to go from house to house to make note of every occupant to determine his or her race and health status.
• Each town's "health" status varied.
• Jarvis began to saw that there was "fallacious and self-condemning document," a mix-ture of accidental and intentional falsehoods
• 1840 was a census duplicity.
• Smith stated black mental illness was destined to be under-enumerated in the South, where there was almost no accommodation for the diagnosis and mental health treatment
• Marshals were told to assess "white" and "colored"
• Jack Coon listed as White in 1850, black in the state census and Native American in 1860
• Dr. James McCune Smith delivered "Comparative Anatomy and Physiology of the Races," he refuted the data.
• Jarvis published a similar refutation and said it would take years to remove.
• Calhoun reported this to the House of Representa-tives, permitting himself a bit of triumphant sermonizing on the dangers of black freedom

Without Sanctuary

• Military medicine proved inadequate in the face of the legendary carnage wrought by the War Between the States.
• Most slaves fled the plantations when the war began and most free blacks fled the South.
• As the Union army drove back the boundaries of the Confederacy, it initially took control of 750,000 black people.
• Waves of sick blacks were herded into camps without adequate nutrition, sanitation, or medical care.
• One out of every four freemen died in the camps.
• The black health programs supported private philanthropies, such as the Rockefeller Foundation.
• The census analysis ignored many of the external causes of illness among black such as venereal diseases, pellagra, hebetude, drapetomania, and Struma Africana.
• The theories stated that African American couldn't exist outside their origins. For example, death would come by living north of Logitude 40.
• Those that had the diseases where unable to get the help/treatment
• Black's was a danger to whites because there had no space in the city.
• The census made the people believe that blacks weren't designed to survive.

Burgeoning Black Diseases

• Pellagra's symptoms are deep skin, diarrhea, mental issues and death (40% of cases).
• Deficiency disease caused by sparse and monotonous diet which was deficient in niacin
• White corns and inferior pork caused the problems
• Then USMHS assigned Goldberger to investagate
• Stated that pellagra was not infectious and it was because he noticed the patients (nor staff in the institutions) would get it.
• So he induced Pellagra by limiting diets
• And proved that Pellagra was not just confined to blacks
• The next important illness discovered was sickle cell
• Irson recognized blood issues in patients
• Noel had the disorder but it wasn't figured out
• Noel never passed his first name that the first to receive intensive care/attention and had black heritage
• So had sickle-cell anemia
• Doctors thought it was a biological heritage
• This resulted in black doctors opening hospitals
• It was a lack of funding
• 1910 they reported to schools
• There were less med schools
• Guardians did stop allegation

An examination of how perceptions of health and disease were used to justify slavery. It explores John C. Calhoun's use of U.S. census data, challenges to this data, and the impact of flawed statistics on the institution of slavery.