psychiatry Psychiatry is the medical specialty devoted to the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of deleterious mental disorder, mental conditions. These include matters related to cognition, perceptions, Mood (psychology), mood, emotion, and behavior. ...

, dysaesthesia aethiopica (literally "Ethiopian bad feeling", "black bad feeling") was an alleged

mental illness A mental disorder, also referred to as a mental illness, a mental health condition, or a psychiatric disability, is a behavioral or mental pattern that causes significant distress or impairment of personal functioning. A mental disorder is ...

described by American physician Samuel A. Cartwright in 1851, which proposed a theory for the cause of laziness among

slaves Slavery is the ownership of a person as property, especially in regards to their labour. Slavery typically involves compulsory work, with the slave's location of work and residence dictated by the party that holds them in bondage. Enslavemen ...

. Today, ''dysaesthesia aethiopica'' is not recognized as a disease, but instead considered an example of

pseudoscience Pseudoscience consists of statements, beliefs, or practices that claim to be both scientific and factual but are incompatible with the scientific method. Pseudoscience is often characterized by contradictory, exaggerated or unfalsifiable cl ...

, and part of the edifice of

scientific racism Scientific racism, sometimes termed biological racism, is the pseudoscience, pseudoscientific belief that the Human, human species is divided into biologically distinct taxa called "race (human categorization), races", and that empirical evi ...

History

Applied exclusively to

African American African Americans, also known as Black Americans and formerly also called Afro-Americans, are an Race and ethnicity in the United States, American racial and ethnic group that consists of Americans who have total or partial ancestry from an ...

s, dysaesthesia aethiopica – called '' rascality'' by the overseers – 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 "

lesion A lesion is any damage or abnormal change in the tissue of an organism, usually caused by injury or diseases. The term ''Lesion'' is derived from the Latin meaning "injury". Lesions may occur in both plants and animals. Types There is no de ...

s 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 adnot been sufficiently directed to the maladies of the negro race." Cartwright felt that dysaesthesia aethiopica was "easily curable, if treated on sound physiological principles."Caplan ''et al.'', p. 37. Insensitivity of the skin was one symptom of the disease, so the skin should be stimulated: Author Vanessa Jackson has noted that lesions were a symptom of dysaesthesia aethiopica and "the ever-resourceful Dr. Cartwright determined that whipping could ... cure this disorder. Of course, one wonders if the whipping were not the cause of the 'lesions' that confirmed the diagnosis." According to Cartwright, after the prescribed "course of treatment" the slave will "look grateful and thankful to the white man whose compulsory power ... has restored his sensation and dispelled the mist that clouded his intellect." According to Cartwright, dysaesthesia aethiopica was "much more prevalent among free negroes living in clusters by themselves, than among

on our plantations, and attacks only such slaves as live like free negroes in regard to diet, drinks, exercise, etc." – indeed, according to Cartwright, "nearly all ree negroesare more or less afflicted with it, that have not got some white person to direct and to take care of them." He explicitly dismissed the opinion which assigned the causes of the "problematic" behaviour to the social situation of the slaves without further justifications: " he northern physiciansignorantly attribute the symptoms to the debasing influence of slavery on the mind."

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 a
Google Books
and excerpted a

** 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) .

External links

{{Webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110709081628/http://academic.udayton.edu/health/01status/mental01.htm , date=2011-07-09 Scientific racism Obsolete medical terms Political abuses of psychiatry Obsolete terms for mental disorders Stereotypes of African Americans Social problems in medicine Slavery in the United States Pseudoscience African-American health Psychiatric false diagnosis History of psychology Post-traumatic stress disorder

History

See also

References

Sources

External links