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.
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![Physician versus Negro • 51 comparatively less minute capillary distribution, and hands and feet which, corresponding to the Negro's evolution, marked him as a race come out of the depths of centuries. Such peculiarities, brought to a climax with the political immediacy of the Civil War and emancipation, doomed the race to high mortality. Paget's disease, rickets, hip-joint disease, giantism, exophthalmic goiter, th)Tnic angiomatoses, and other diseases cut sharp inroads into the future of the race. Respiratory organs, vulnerable in their lack of stamina, yielded to pneumonia, pleurisy, pulmonary tuberculosis, and associated lung diseases which all but settled the race prob¬ lem by way of outright elimination.^^ There was a certain morbidness in the physician's emphasis upon the sexual appetite in the Negro race. The greater abdominal and genital development of the Negro merely corroborated the inferi¬ ority of his other anatomical peculiarities—his black skin, flat nose, lesser cranial and thoracic development.^^ The Negro's lower level of consciousness left him out of touch with the higher forms of human experience and weaved a corporeal structure, almost vestigial in nature, whose sexual characteristics reflected those sexual extremes [which] belong to the age of awakening con¬ sciousness, or nascent intelligence, a stage of incipiency to moral and mental development.The Negro brain, some one thousand years behind . . . the white man's brain in its evolutionary data, existed within a visceral and organic structure that was physio¬ logically juxtaposed to its intellectual capacity.^^ The Negro's moral delinquencies, along with elements of bestiality and gratification, were demonstrations of the close relationship of the race to its animal subhuman ancestors.Confined within narrow physical functions, the Negro's nearness to a superior race merely accelerated his innate tendency to sex appetite. Physicians often emphasized the extreme precocity and early 34 William T. English, The Negro Problem from the Physician's Point of View, Atlanta Journal-Record of Medicine, V (Oct., 1903), 462-63; Harris, Fu¬ ture of the Negro, 58, 60. 35 Cunningham, Morbidity and Mortality, 115. 36 English, The Negro Problem, 467. 37 Ibid., 463. 38 Ibid., 468. 39 Ibid., 465.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b18025729_0072.JP2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
