Drapetomania

Drapetomania is a discredited pseudo-medical hypothesis proposed in 1851 by American physician Samuel A. Cartwright to explain enslaved African Americans who fled captivity. Cartwright, writing within the framework of scientific racism prevalent in the antebellum South, held that slavery was beneficial to enslaved people and therefore concluded that any impulse to escape must itself be a form of mental illness requiring treatment. The term combines Greek roots meaning runaway slave and madness. While some Southern publications reprinted Cartwright's claims approvingly, physicians and editors in Northern medical journals widely ridiculed the theory at the time, and critics such as Frederick Law Olmsted noted pointedly that white indentured servants had also long been known to run away without anyone diagnosing them with a mental disorder. Drapetomania is preserved today in medical and historical scholarship as a stark example of how psychiatric authority was misused to pathologize resistance to slavery, and remains a frequently cited case study in the history of scientific racism.