Race and Medicine in Nineteenth-and Early-Twentieth-Century America

Todd Savitt

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781612779904
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

An examination of the medical experiences of African Americans

During the days of slavery in America, racism and often-faulty medical theories contributed to an atmosphere in which African Americans were seen as chattel: some white physicians claimed that African Americans had physiological and anatomical differences that made them well suited for slavery. These attitudes continued into the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras.

In Race and Medicine historian Todd Savitt presents revised and updated versions of his seminal essays on the medical history of African Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially in the South. This collection examines a variety of aspects of African American medical history, including health and illnesses, medical experimentation, early medical schools and medical professionals, and slave life insurance.

Savitt examines the history of sickle-cell anemia and identifies the first two patients with the disease noted in medical literature. He proposes an explanation of why the disease was not well known in the general African American population for at least 50 years after its discovery. He also explains why African Americans developed elephantiasis in the Charleston Low Country and not elsewhere in the country. Other topics Savitt explores include African American medical schools, the formation of an African American medical profession, and SIDS among Virginia slaves.

With its new research data and interpretations of existing materials, Race and Medicine will be a valuable resource to those interested in the history of medicine and African American history as well as to the medical community.

Notes

1. SMOTHERING AND OVERLAYING OF VIRGINIA SLAVE CHILDREN

This chapter originally appeared as “Smothering and Overlaying of Virginia Slave Children: A Suggested Explanation,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 49 (1975): 400–404.

The author is indebted to Carole L. Savitt for calling to his attention the article that led him to connect Sudden Infant Death Syndrome with overlaying and to Willie Lee Rose, now of Johns Hopkins University, for originally posing the problem of slave smothering. This publication was supported in part by NIH Grant 1 RO1 LM 02071 from the National Library of Medicine, 1973–76.

1. Virginia, Register of Deaths (manuscript on microfilm), 1853–1860, Southampton County, Augusta County, Petersburg Town, Staunton Town, at Virginia State Library, Richmond, Virginia; United States, Bureau of the Census, Mortality Statistics of the Seventh Census of the United States, 1850 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1855), 290–295. The infant mortality rate for the entire country, according to the 1850 Census, was 16.4 percent, and 18.3 percent for the slaveholding states.

2. U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Vital Statistics of the United States (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1967), IIA, 2–31.

3. In 1999, pneumonia and influenza were responsible for only 3.1 percent of infant deaths between one and eleven months, a substantial reduction from when this article was first published in the mid-1970s. Robert N. Anderson, “Deaths: Leading Causes for 1999,” in U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, National Vital Statistics Reports 49 (Oct. 12, 2001): 12.

4. Abraham B. Bergman, J. Bruce Beckwith, and C. George Ray, eds., Sudden Infant Death Syndrome: Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Causes of Sudden Death in Infants (Seattle, 1970), 18.

5. J. Bruce Beckwith, “Defining the Sudden Infant Death Syndrome,” Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine 157 (2003): 286–94.

6. Anderson, “Deaths,” 76.

7. J. Bruce Beckwith and Abraham B. Bergman, “The Sudden Death Syndrome of Infancy,” Hospital Practice 2 (Nov. 1967): 44.

8. Nathaniel Ryan, Saratoga, Buckingham County, Virginia, to Edmund W. Hubard, Washington, D.C., Dec. 15, 1841, Hubard Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, N.C. (hereafter cited as Hubard Papers).

9. Robert T. Hubard, Rosny, Buckingham County, Virginia, to Edmund W. Hubard, Washington, D.C., Dec. 21, 1841, Hubard Papers.

10. Beckwith and Bergman, “Sudden Death Syndrome,” 50–51. See also, on the history of SIDS, Todd L. Savitt, “The Social and Medical History of Crib Death,” Journal of the Florida Medical Association 66 (1979): 853–59; Warren G. Guntheroth, “The Thymus, Suffocation, and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome—Social Agenda or Hubris?” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 37 (Autumn 1993): 2–13; Warren G. Guntheroth, Crib Death: The Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, 3d ed. (Armonk, N.Y.: Futura Publishing, 1995); Abraham B. Bergman, The “Discovery” of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome: Lessons in the Practice of Political Medicine (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1986); Susan M. Beal, “The Rise and Fall of Several Theories,” in Sudden Infant Death Syndrome: Problems, Progress and Possibilities, ed. Roger W. Byard and Henry F. Krous (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001), 238.

11. Beckwith, “Defining the Sudden Infant Death Syndrome,” 287.

12. Abraham B. Bergman, C. G. Ray, M. A. Pomeroy, P. W. Wahl, and J. B. Beckwith, “Studies of the Sudden Infant Death Syndrome in King County, Washington. III. Epidemiology,” Pediatrics 49 (1972): 863; John W. Melton, Abdullah Fatteh, and Geoffrey Mann, “Sudden and Unexpected Deaths in Infancy,” Virginia Medical Monthly 95 (1968): 64–65.

13. Virginia, Register of Deaths (manuscript on microfilm), 1853–1860, Accomac, Albemarle, Amelia, Arlington, Augusta, Bedford, Botetourt, Brunswick, Cumberland, Essex, Fairfax, Fauquier, Floyd, Frederick, Greene, Greensville, Halifax, Hanover, Henrico, Henry, Isle of Wight, Lancaster, Pittsylvania, and Southampton Counties; Petersburg and Staunton Towns, at Virginia State Library, Richmond, Va. The oldest child in the survey to die of suffocation was six years old.

14. For current thinking on the causes of SIDS, see Byard and Krous, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, and Guntheroth, Crib Death.

15. Anderson, “Deaths,” 76, 77.

16. M. Valdes-Dapena, L. J. Birle, J. A. McGovern, J. F. McGillen, and F. H. Colwell, “Sudden Unexpected Death in Infancy: A Statistical Analysis of Certain Socioeconomic Factors,” Journal of Pediatrics 73 (1968): 390–92. A researcher discussing the epidemiology of SIDS in 2001 wrote, “One explanation for the higher rate of SIDS among African Americans is the higher concentration of socioeconomic risk factors commonly associated with SIDS, such as young maternal age, single marital status, lower education and poverty. The effect of race was eliminated in one study after controlling for family income and maternal education. In another study, where only infants of college educated couples were included, there were no differences in the rates of SIDS, despite the twice higher incidence of low birth weight in African-American infants. The higher rate of SIDS can also be explained, in part, by higher usage of the prone sleeping position by black mothers (43 percent) compared with white mothers (22 percent). Other practices such as bed-sharing, which is more common among African Americans, may also contribute to the higher rate.” Fern R. Hauck, “Changing Epidemiology,” in Byard and Krous, eds., Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, 33–35.

17. N. S. Weiss, D. Green, and D. E. Krueger, “Problems in the Use of Death Certificates to Identify Sudden Unexpected Infant Deaths,” Health Services Reports 88 (1973): 555–58.

18. Thomas Affleck, “On the Hygiene of Cotton Plantations and the Management of Negro Slaves,” Southern Medical Reports 2 (1851): 435.

19. Bureau of the Census, Mortality Statistics, 1850, 28.

20. See, for instance, the case of Opha Jane in the Powhatan County, Virginia, Order Book no. 29, 1851–1856, 501 (Apr. 7, 1856), at Virginia State Library, Richmond, Va.

21. Michael P. Johnson demonstrated in 1981 that differing rates of smothering, overlaying, and suffocation of enslaved children around the South correlated with differing labor demands on pregnant women. Though he took his argument in a different direction (because at that time SIDS researchers still believed that it was extremely unlikely that children could be accidentally smothered by their mothers), the evidence he provided could now be used to show that exhausted enslaved mothers could have accidentally overlaid and smothered their infant children. Thus not all antebellum infant deaths among the enslaved attributed to smothering, overlaying, and suffocation were instances of SIDS. See Johnson, “Smothered Slave Infants: Were Slave Mothers at Fault?” Journal of Southern History 47 (1981): 493–520.

2. FILARIASIS (ELEPHANTIASIS) IN THE UNITED STATES

This chapter originally appeared as “Filariasis [Elephantiasis] in the United States,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 32 (1977): 140–50.

Research and publication of this article were supported in part by National Institutes of Health Grant LM 02477 from the National Library of Medicine, 1973–76.

1. Alfred W. Crosby Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1972), 35–63, 122–64. See also P. M. Ashburn, The Ranks of Death: A Medical History of the Conquest of America, ed. Frank D. Ashburn (New York: Coward-McCann, 1947). The origin of syphilis is still a matter of controversy among medical historians. Some argue for a Europ...