thumb|upright|[[Samuel A. Cartwright (1793–1863)]]

Drapetomania was a proposed mental illness that, in 1851, American physician Samuel A. Cartwright hypothesized as the cause of enslaved Americans fleeing captivity. This hypothesis was based on the belief that slavery was such an improvement upon the lives of slaves that only those suffering from some form of mental illness would wish to escape.

Cartwright specifically cited the tendency of slaves to flee the plantations that held them. Since slaves happy with their condition would not want to leave, he inferred that such people had to be sick, impervious to the natural order of things. He published an article about black slaves' illnesses and idiosyncrasies in De Bow's Review. Contemporarily reprinted in the South, Cartwright's article was widely mocked and satirized in the northern United States. The concept has since been debunked as pseudoscience and shown to be part of the edifice of scientific racism.

The term derives from the Greek (, 'a runaway [slave]') and (, 'madness, frenzy').

As late as 1914, the third edition of Thomas Lathrop Stedman's Practical Medical Dictionary included an entry for drapetomania, defined as "vagabondage, dromomania; an uncontrollable or insane impulsion to wander."

Description

thumb|upright|Engraving of an escaped slave, published in 1837

Cartwright described the disorder—which, he said, was "unknown to our medical authorities, although its diagnostic symptom, the absconding from service, is well known to our planters and overseers"

In Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race, Cartwright says that the Bible calls for a slave to be submissive to his master, and by doing so, the slave will have no desire to run away:

Contemporaneous criticism

While Cartwright's article was reprinted in the South, in the northern United States it was widely mocked. A satirical analysis of the article appeared in a Buffalo Medical Journal editorial in 1855. Renowned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, in A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (1856), observed that white indentured servants had often been known to flee as well, so he satirically hypothesized that the supposed disease was actually of white European origin, and had been introduced to Africa by traders.

Stephen Jay Gould identified Cartwright as "a prominent Southern physician" with the caveat that Cartwright's defenses of slavery constituted "an extreme within the range of 'scientific argument'" that was not typical and may have been unsupported by "many intelligent Southerners."

See also

  • Dysaesthesia aethiopica, another novel diagnosis of Cartwright regarding what was seen as a mental illness that was the cause of laziness among slaves.
  • The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease
  • Depression
  • Dromomania
  • Political abuse of psychiatry
  • Fugitive slave
  • Classification of mental disorders
  • Sluggish schizophrenia
  • Biology of depression
  • Gaslighting

References

Sources

  • Samuel A. Cartwright, "Report on the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race", The New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal 1851:691–715 (May).
  • Reprinted in DeBow's Review XI (1851). Available at Google Books and excerpted at PBS.org.
  • Reprinted in Arthur Caplan, H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., and James McCartney, eds, Concepts of Health and Disease in Medicine: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 1980).
  • Reprinted in Arthur L. Caplan, James J. McCartney, Dominic A. Sisti, eds, Health, Disease, and Illness: Concepts in Medicine (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2004)
  • An Early History – African American Mental Health
  • DicoPolHiS

Bibliography

  • Katherine Bankole, Slavery and Medicine: Enslavement and Medical Practices in Antebellum Louisiana, New York: Taylor and Francis Group, 1998.
  • Bob Myers, "Drapetomania": Rebellion, Defiance and Free Black Insanity in the Antebellum United States, phD thesis, 2014.