Dr. Samuel Cartwright, born in Fairfax County Virginia, was the son of Rev. John S. Cartwright. He was trained at a young age in the language of Greek and Latin and grew up to become one of the most prominent physicians in antebellum Mississippi. He published articles on yellow fever, cholera, diphtheria, syphilis, the uses of iodine, surgical removal of ovarian tumors, and other conditions that advanced medical science. He was a prominent physician with great national influence and earned the praise of the medical community, reaching as far as Europe.

In 1851 he published “Diseases and Peculiarities of the N***o Race” in a southern magazine primarily focused on the agricultural industry. The diseases he described only affected Black people, one of them a mental illness he called “drapetomania.” He created this term from two greek words, drapetes, meaning to run away, and mania, meaning madness. He claimed this illness was the reason behind why many enslaved Black people continued to flee enslavement.

In a series of published letters to Rev. William Winans in 1843, Cartwright’s racial views were clear. He believed that the relationship between the enslaver and the enslaved was “not based upon human but Divine law.” Drawing from the abhorrent Hamitic curse theory he concluded that the Bible cursed the “Ethiopian” to be a “servant of servants.” Unsurprisingly, Cartwright’s consciousness was formed by the colonialist-turned-southern brand of white supremacist christianity and his pro-southern political views (Jefferson Davis was one of his patients). He was incapable of separating his theology and ideology from his medical research.

Cartwright’s theory of “drapetomania” was declared as pseudoscience.

Among the many things Cartwright’s story demonstrates is how the consciousness of the oppressor is incapable of understanding liberation. His diseased imagination was not only sickened by the sin of white supremacy, but the heretical brand of christianity it supported and its death-dealing politics of the pro-slavery confederate south committed to the commodification of black and brown bodies and exploitive economics. Power and privilege, and in Cartwright’s case white privilege, blinds the eyes, twists the mind, and arrests the conscious which, as the 2nd century African church leader Origen (185-253CE) said, is the “chamber of justice.”

Sources: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4231017, https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2018.0164,  and https://mississippiencyclopedia.org/entries/samuel-adolphus-cartwright/