Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840

In 1748, as yellow fever raged in Charleston, South Carolina, doctor John Lining remarked, "There is something very singular in the constitution of the Negroes, which renders them not liable to this fever." Lining's comments presaged ideas about blackness that would endure in medical discourses and beyond. In this fascinating medical history, Rana A. Hogarth examines the creation and circulation of medical ideas about blackness in the Atlantic World during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She shows how white physicians deployed blackness as a medically significant marker of difference and used medical knowledge to improve plantation labor efficiency, safeguard colonial and civic interests, and enhance control over black bodies during the era of slavery.

Hogarth refigures Atlantic slave societies as medical frontiers of knowledge production on the topic of racial difference. Rather than looking to their counterparts in Europe who collected and dissected bodies to gain knowledge about race, white physicians in Atlantic slaveholding regions created and tested ideas about race based on the contexts in which they lived and practiced. What emerges in sharp relief is the ways in which blackness was reified in medical discourses and used to perpetuate notions of white supremacy.

• Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology
• Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (America and the Long 19th Century)
• Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World
• Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty
• The Experiential Caribbean
• Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
• Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (Studies in Legal History)
• Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology
• Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness And Suffering During The Civil War And Reconstruction
• Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics