Samuel A. Cartwright

And so let's talk about when racism puts on a white coat.

In 1851, physician Samuel Cartwright produced the fabricated condition.

Now I'm a, y'all pray for me, okay? Deceithia ethiopia, pretty much, pretty much describing this supposed black deficiencies through racist medical reasoning.

What are you talking about, Dr. G? He also promoted a separate invented diagnosis called drapomania to explain enslaved people trying to escape that they were sick.

Amount of fear in enslavers.

I mean, these are many of the same people who believed in Samuel Cartwright's bizarre contention that Black people who wanted to run away were actually suffering from a disease, something he called drapetomania.

Cartwright mentions two potential treatments for the disease: treating one's slaves kindly but firmly, or failing that, quote, "whipping the devil out of them." The Underground Railroad is actually one of the reasons that many southern states were so adamant about passing the Fugitive Slave Law of eighteen fifty, so that even if their enslaved property escaped to the North, these northern states would, by law, be required to assist the slave catchers and slave holders in recapturing the escapees.

If they didn't, there would be a significant fine.

I know what you're trying to do, but it's not working.

The only poem like that that survived was the poem about Samuel Cartwright, who was a racist pseudoscientist at the time.

And that's the only one that survived because, I guess I pulled it off.

The African American Review published it, and it really does reveal the hypocrisy and the The non-science of racist pseudoscience, which justified, which was used to justify and rationalize all of chattel slavery, because that poem also reveals that he didn't believe in germ theory.

In 1851, the profession got specific.

Samuel Cartwright named a disease that makes somebody run.

That disease was called drapedomania.

The wish was to be free, but it was filed as a symptom of mania, drapedomania, the uncontrollable desire to wanna run away.