Samuel A. Cartwright

Samuel Adolphus Cartwright (1793 to 1863) was an American physician who practised in Mississippi and Louisiana in the antebellum United States. He studied medicine under Benjamin Rush at the University of Pennsylvania, gained a reputation for expertise in cholera prevention, and served as a physician in the Confederate States Army, where he worked on improving sanitary conditions in camps near Vicksburg and Port Hudson. He is best remembered for pseudoscientific claims made in a report to the Medical Association of Louisiana in 1851, in which he promoted drapetomania, a supposed disease that made enslaved people want to flee, and dysaesthesia aethiopica, a supposed disorder of enslaved and free Black people. He also asserted false racial differences in brain size and in the respiratory and skeletal systems, and he publicly rejected germ theory. He accumulated wealth through the slave economy of the cotton South. The Medicine Atlas records him as a documented example of racist pseudoscience presented as medicine, which later medical history has rejected.