Date
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Chapter Title: Developmental Disorder, Racial Dissolution: Racial Typologies of Developmental Normalcy in Early Child Medicine, 1830 - 1870. 
 
Chapter Description: This chapter argues that early texts on the physiology and pathologies of infancy and childhood reflected anatomical, physiological, and medical preoccupations with child disease and development as typological phenomena that were not generalizable across races. Instead, child development referred to a non-statistical “normal” that did not claim universality, but one that cohered within species or races. The first section analyzes medical treatises, with an emphasis on the developmental events most frequently associated with racial differentiation: cranial suture closure and puberty. The second section examines a wider range of medical, physiological, and ethnological texts to delineate how variable rates of development and the degree of synchronicity between competing developmental drives (i.e. physical and intellectual) generated racial hierarchies and threatened racial degeneration. More specifically, this section interrogates how “ethnic” classifications of idiocy and medical alarmism about precocious puberty and “puberty-as-crisis,” pathologized developmental timing and patterns in white children that were commonly accepted as typical in Black children. I argue that developmental norms actually constituted racial types, thus reframing developmental disorder as a threat to racial order. Finally, the concluding section contemplates how ecologies and epistemologies of anti/Blackness mutually reinforced one another in the antebellum U.S. 
 
Kelsey Henry is a PhD Candidate in American Studies at Yale University, where she also received an MA in the History of Science and Medicine. Her work follows the legacies of nineteenth-century scientific metrics of human development and racial difference, metrics forged in the crucible of racial slavery, in histories of twentieth-century developmental science and biomedicine. She historicizes the production of developmental technologies and norms that are often perceived as race-neutral, like pediatric growth charts and developmental screening tests, interrogating the racial premises and parameters of developmental knowledge production and its material effects on Black life. Kelsey is a CHSTM Research Fellow for 2021-2022. Her work is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Yale’s Intersectional, Queer, and Trans Materialisms Initiative, and she has previously received support from the Dean’s Emerging Scholars Fellowship and the Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship. She is involved in disability studies programming and disability justice initiatives at Yale and beyond, as a co-organizer of Yale’s Disability Studies Working Group, the Assistant Editor of Disability Studies Quarterly, and a co-host of the Disability History Association Podcast.