Why read Medicalizing Blackness?

Book cover of Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840

Book description

In 1748, as yellow fever raged in Charleston, South Carolina, doctor John Lining remarked, ""There is something very singular in the constitution of the Negroes, which renders them not liable to this fever."" Lining's comments presaged ideas about blackness that would endure in medical discourses and beyond. In this fascinating…

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American history

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Why read it?

1 author picked Medicalizing Blackness as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Andrew Curran

Author

This groundbreaking book takes the reader into the forgotten world of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century medicine, especially as it relates to the enslaved peoples of the New World (from the Southern United States to the wider Caribbean). One cannot help but hear the first examples of “race norming” or “adjusting” in Hogarth’s study of how white doctors saw pathology, treatment, and various diseases themselves as affecting different categories of people in different ways. Medicalizing Blackness allows us to see how doctors transformed the New World into an enormous laboratory that not only generated new knowledge, but created structures of surveillance and…

From Henry's list on race and the enlightenment.