Drapetomania and Its Afterlives: Pathologizing Black Resistance in US Medical History

In 1851, Dr. Samuel Cartwright published his “Report on the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race” in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal, writing for a white readership obsessed with Black resistance to enslavement. Just the year before, as a critical part of the compromise of 1850, the United States government had strengthened the fugitive slave act, allowing government agents to abduct enslaved runaways who had made it to the free states. This context gave added weight to the new disease that Cartwright conjured up in his report: Drapetomania. Cartwright defined drapetomania as the disease that caused enslaved people to runaway, and it was a part of several racially-specific mental pathologies in the report. Whether it be committing petty offenses like livestock theft, simply showing signs of depression, or running away, Cartwright argued that Black people resisting enslavement were insane.

In this presentation, I will analyze drapetomania in the context of the antebellum era as well as gesturing towards its ongoing resonance after emancipation and into the present. Building upon recent scholarship on antebellum psychiatry, I argue that psychiatry in many ways evolved in this period as a means to institutionalize and force labor out of those unwilling to work in the antebellum United States. Drapetomania directly built upon this logic, arguing that those resisting enslavement were insane. The logic drapetomania survived emancipation. In Jim Crow asylums, Black people were forced into regimes of agricultural labor. Finally, racial disparities in schizophrenia diagnoses reveal further continuities in the use of mental health to inhibit Black resistance in the modern United States. In short, while Cartwright invented drapetomania to pathologize resistance to a dying slave system, his diagnosis has survived in how medical professionals too often treat Black resistance as a form of mental illness.