Drapetomania- Slave Disease , Called Freedom!

Courageous Freedom Seekers were said to have contracted a disease...  Drapetomania!

 

Drapetomania was a purported mental illness that caused enslaved black  to flee captivity, described by American doctor Samuel Cartwright, in 1851. 

 

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Click & Listen to William Katz, author "Breaking The Chains"  Thursday at 8pm WWW.BlogTalkRadio.com/BlackHistory

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According to Cartwright, the illness resulted from masters who “made themselves too familiar with [slaves], treating them as equals” and prescribed “whipping the devil out of them” as a “preventative measure.” In his work, Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race, Cartwright’s justification for drapetomania is primarily Biblical, citing the idea that slaves must obey their masters.

 

The title of the exhibition is taken from an article in the monthly Southern journal entitled The Georgia Blister and Critic, v. 1, #7 (Sept. 1854), p. 156 (exhibit #20). The journal dealt with the “diseases and physical peculiarities of the Negro race.” In the article, the word drapetomania was created by the noted 

 

Louisiana surgeon and psychologist Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright by combining the Greek words for runaway slave andmad or crazy. 

 

It was used to describe the mental disease that “induces the negro to run away from service, [and] is as much a disease of the mind as any other species of mental alienation, and much more curable, as a general rule.”

 

 

Click & Listen Thursday @ 8pm ~ William Katz?, author, Breaking The Chains!"