"Drapetomania, or the disease causing Negroes to run away" (New Orleans, 1851)
Record: the document says itPattern: documents line upLens: our readingOpen: not yet proven
Year: 1851 · Places: Louisiana, Africa
SUMMARY"Drapetomania, or the disease causing Negroes to run away" (New Orleans, 1851) [Connections: Masonic color line, asylums, castles, wight, Nov 5, 2026]
RECORDDr. Samuel A. Cartwright, "Report on the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race," New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal (May 1851), pp. 691–715. It was reprinted in De Bow's Review vol. XI (1851). The heading reads "DRAPETOMANIA, OR THE DISEASE CAUSING NEGROES TO RUN AWAY." Cartwright calls it "unknown to our medical authorities," although its "diagnostic symptom, the absconding from service, is well known to our planters and overseers." When enslaved people were "sulky and dissatisfied without cause," he writes, slaveholders' experience "was decidedly in favor of whipping them out of it, as a preventive measure against absconding... It was called whipping the devil out of them." HOSTILE
WITNESSa slaveholding-society physician writing for planters
PATTERNSeeking freedom was relabeled as a mental disease, and medicine was used to justify the whip
LENS (WW9)Running to freedom was written down as madness
OPENPin each quote to its page in a scan of De Bow's Review XI (1851), pp. 331–336
SOURCEPBS, Africans in America: Cartwright excerpt; Wikipedia: Drapetomania.