Outcasts from evolution : scientific attitudes of racial inferiority, 1859-1900 / John S. Haller, Jr.
- Haller, John S., Jr., 1940-
- Date:
- [1971]
Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
Credit: Outcasts from evolution : scientific attitudes of racial inferiority, 1859-1900 / John S. Haller, Jr. Source: Wellcome Collection.
66/256 page 46
![46 • Outcasts from Evolution natural laws by emancipation had left its slimy trail of sometimes ineradicable disease upon [the Negro's] physical being, and the licentiousness Miller thought evident in the freed Negro brought upon him a beautiful harvest of mental and physical degeneration and he is now becoming a martyr to an heredity thus established. While the Negro could live in comfort under less favorable cir¬ cumstances than the white man, having a nervous organization less sensitive to his environments, Miller wrote, yet it is true that he has less mental equipoise, and may suffer mental alienation from influences and agencies which would not affect a race mentally stronger.^® Without a proper ancestry conditioned by the responsibilities of freedom and without the education or preparedness for respon¬ sibility, the Negro citizen, thrust into a modern world which he had in no way helped to create, deteriorated under the strain.^® French anthropologist Paul Topinard noted a perceptible increase in the relative frequency of mania and idiocy in the Negro popu¬ lation after emancipation. Forced to do battle with the necessities of the social condition of freedom, the emancipated slave fell vic¬ tim to the vicissitudes of mental disorder.^ So overwhelming was the strain, wrote Dr. J. Allison Hodges, dean of the College of Medicine in Richmond, that the Negro in America was either dying out or reverting to his primitive savagery, as evidenced in his unrestrained sexual passion.It seemed clear to many physi¬ cians that the American negro [would] never become firmly estab¬ lished in the right methods of living before disease and death . . . thinned his ranks and there will be no race problem.Even if, as some speculated, the Negro population was indeed increasing, physicians argued that such increase could only come at the ex¬ pense of moral and physical development. When the pendulum swings the other way, wrote a member of the American Medical 18 Ibid., 290. Ibid., 292-93. 20 Paul Topinard, Anthropology (London, 1878), 413. J. Allison Hodges, The Effect of Freedom upon the Physical and Psycho¬ logical Development of the Negro, Richmond Journal of Practice, XIV (June, 1900), 170-71. ^2 Seale Harris, The Future of the Negro from the Standpoint of the Southern Physician, Alabama Medical Journal, XIV (Jan., 1902), 58.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b18025729_0067.JP2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
