thumb|Samuel Cartwright, 1793–1863
In psychiatry, dysaesthesia aethiopica (literally "Ethiopian bad feeling", "black bad feeling") was an alleged mental illness described by American physician Samuel A. Cartwright in 1851, which proposed a theory for the cause of laziness among slaves. Today, dysaesthesia aethiopica is not recognized as a disease, but instead considered an example of pseudoscience, and part of the edifice of scientific racism.
History
thumb|right|Lesions on the back of an enslaved African from Mississippi
Applied exclusively to African Americans, dysaesthesia aethiopica was characterized by partial insensitivity of the skin and "so great a hebetude of the intellectual faculties, as to be like a person half asleep." Other symptoms included dry, thick, rough skin and "lesions of the body discoverable to the medical observer, which are always present and sufficient to account for the symptoms." Cartwright contended that the existence of dysaesthesia aethiopica was "clearly established by the most direct and positive testimony," but other doctors had failed to notice it because their "attention [had] not been sufficiently directed to the maladies of the negro race." Insensitivity of the skin was one symptom of the disease, so the skin should be stimulated: