Chris has accepted a Lapidus Center Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
Christopher Willoughby
Tulane University
Treating the Black Body: Race and Medicine in American Culture, 1800-1861
Abstract: Based in the writing of antebellum medical students, their senior theses in particular, this project analyzes the growing presence of racial science in medical education. It argues that the paradigm shift in early-nineteenth-century medical thought influenced by French anatomical pathology fertilized the ground for a multi-species biology of humanity. Moreover, racial science influenced medical education on a national scale and was not simply the scientific byproduct of southern racism. This thesis also situates racial science as existing in both the realm of politics and in the context of legitimate midcentury science. In making this argument, this dissertation focuses on three medical schools as test cases: the University of Pennsylvania, Transylvania University, and the Medical University of the State of South Carolina. Statistical and qualitative analysis of medical student theses at these universities will provide both general and particular images of how black bodies became anatomical bodies.
Updates
Willoughby is currently writing his dissertation at Tulane University. In April 2014, he was awarded a Dissertation Research Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation's Program in Science, Technology, and Society for the project, "A History of Pathological Anatomy and Racial Science in America." This fall he was awarded the Waring Historical Library's W. Curtis Worthington Jr. Prize for the best graduate student essay in the history of the health sciences for his paper, "Running Away from Drapetomania: Rethinking Samuel Cartwright."