AMERICAN POLYGENY AND CRANIOMETRY
matter in the cranium... that is the true cause of that debasement
of mind, which has rendered the people of Africa unable to take
care of themselves" (from Chorover, 1979; all quotes from Cart-
wright are taken from papers he presented to the 1851 meeting of
the Louisiana Medical Association.)
Cartwright even had a name for it—dysesthesia, a disease of
inadequate breathing. He described its symptoms in slaves: "When
driven to labor ... he performs the task assigned to him in a head-
long and careless manner, treading down with his feet or cutting
with his hoe the plants he is put to cultivate—breaking the tools he
works with, and spoiling everything he touches." Ignorant North-
erners attributed this behavior to "the debasing influence of slav-
ery," but Cartwright recognized it as the expression of a true
disease. He identified insensibility to pain as another symptom:
"When the unfortunate individual is subjected to punishment, he
neither feels pain of any consequence... [nor] any unusual resent-
ment more than stupid sulkiness. In some cases... there appears
to be an almost total loss of feeling." Cartwright proposed the fol-
lowing cure:
The liver, skin and kidneys should be stimulated to activity ... to assist
in decarbonizing the blood. The best means to stimulate the skin is, first,
to have the patient well washed with warm water and soap; then to anoint
it all over with oil, and to slap the oil in with a broad leather strap; then to
put the patient to some hard kind of work in the open air and sunshine
that will compel him to expand his lungs, as chopping wood, splitting rails,
or sawing with the crosscut or whip saw.
Cartwright did not end his catalogue of diseases with dys-
esthesia. He wondered why slaves often tried to flee, and identified
the cause as a mental disease called drapetomania, or the insane
desire to run away. "Like children, they are constrained by unalter-
able physiological laws, to love those in authority over them.
Hence, from a law of his nature, the negro can no more help lov-
ing a kind master, than the child can help loving her that gives it
suck." For slaves afflicted with drapetomania, Cartwright pro-
posed a behavioral cure: owners should avoid both extreme per-
missiveness and cruelty: "They have only to be kept in that state,
and treated like children, to prevent and cure them from running
away."
The defenders of slavery did not need polygeny. Religion still