Dr. Cartwright’s strange diagnosis
Dr. Samuel Adolphus Cartwright was a leading New Orleans physician from 1840s until after the Civil War and for a time was the surgeon general of the Confederate States of America.
He was a strong supporter of slavery and insisted that his study of the Bible had shown that the Black race was not intended for any higher pursuits. Not surprisingly, he was a close friend of Confederate President Jefferson Davis.
Cartwright was also the proponent of a several of farfetched “scientific” claims about Blacks and coined the term Drapetomania, a disease he imagined existing that caused slaves to run away. He believed that the disease could be cured with “proper medical advice.”
He wrote that with his recommended treatments, slaves would not run away even when they lived adjacent to free states, “within a stone’s throw of abolitionists.”
To support his theory, he used convoluted interpretations from the Hebrew Pentateuch. He said that slave holders that were too familiar and “easy” with slaves were just as likely as those who treated them cruelly to suffer runaways.
He offers no real proof for his ideas and even among some Southerners his ideas were controversial, mostly because of his interpretation of the Bible. No opinions were printed that contradicted his idea that slavery was a good and natural condition for Black people.
Cartwright found a regular audience for his views in a popular magazine out of New Orleans called DeBow’s Review, which printed a number of other articles from apologists for the Southern way of life.
There was no evidence I could find that showed Cartwright himself owned slaves but he supported the system of slavery.
On to this week’s stories.
MANY SLAVE HOLDERS thought little about splitting up families if a sale of one human being could be beneficial to them financially, which is why so many Black children during the slave period were brought up by mothers, or those who were not even related.
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