Untitled Notes

The history of mental illness intersects significantly with the histories of gender, race, and sexuality.
This week's focus: The complex relationship between race, mental illness, and psychiatry.
Recent attention on racial health disparities: health differences across racial groups.
Psychiatry, like broader medicine, is affected by histories of white supremacy, racial segregation, and persistent inequality.

The antebellum period: Medicine influenced by gender essentialism and significantly, racial essentialism.
Interaction between gender and racial essentialism shaped medical practices and beliefs during the 19th century.

Definition: A belief in separately evolved species.
Concept originated from polygenism advanced the idea that African-Americans were well-suited for tropical climates, making them less sensitive to heat and certain diseases.
Medical doctors believed that Black individuals had greater immunity to tropical diseases like malaria and yellow fever.

Malaria: A fever-inducing illness transmitted by mosquitoes.
Despite numerous records of enslaved Africans dying from malaria, doctors dismissed the severity of the disease among Black individuals.
Quote from Dr. Philip Teinemann (1826): "Intermittent fever… has no terror for the Negro… requires but little medicine to rid him of this enemy."

A persistent belief existed that Black people did not experience physical or psychological pain to the same extent as white people.
Resulting in under-medication or denial of anesthesia to Black patients.
Quote from a physician: "Blacks bear surgical operations much better than white people."
Example of a Georgian physician amputation case regarding a 15-year-old enslaved girl, indicating less concern because of the belief in a higher pain tolerance.
Some doctors compared African Americans to animals regarding pain perception, further perpetuating abusive treatment.

Before professionalization of medicine, Southern physicians conducted medical research on enslaved individuals, using plantations as experimentation sites.
Nearly half of original articles in a medical journal from 1836 focused on experiments conducted on African-Americans.
Human subjects were used for various medical trials, including eye surgeries and cesarean sections.

Compelling accounts of African-Americans being kidnapped from streets for experimentation.
Testing the efficacy of anesthetics like ether became a focus in these oppressive medical practices.

Medical experimentation on enslaved peoples became a point of criticism among abolitionists and was incorporated in the movement to abolish slavery.
Southern doctors began to conceal the race of their subjects to avoid backlash from abolitionists.
James Marion Sims: Recognized as the founder of modern gynecology but infamous for using enslaved women in painful surgical procedures without anesthesia.
Noted disparity: Generally administered anesthesia to white female patients but not to Black female patients.

White slaveholders often sent sick or unproductive enslaved individuals to hospitals for experimentation.
Example of a report from the Medical College of Virginia (1840) highlighting the use of enslaved bodies for clinical instruction.
Medical journals from Richmond documented about 200 procedures from 1851-1860, with significant estimates showing that half involved African-Americans.

African-American physicians like James McCune Smith and Montague Cobb condemned these inhumane practices and defended human rights.

In 1989, discovery of over 10,000 human remains revealed grave injustices that included bodies stolen from an African-American burial ground for medical research.
About 75% of the remains found were identified as African American, highlighting a continued legacy of exploitation.

This history raises serious ethical questions regarding trust in medical institutions, especially in the Black community.
Historical associations of hospitals and medical schools as places of terror and violence rather than healing affect contemporary understanding and suspicions towards psychiatry.

Moving forward: Specific exploration of the role of race in the history of psychiatry is the next focus in the curriculum.