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.
76/256 page 56
![56 • Outcasts from Evolution One of the characters of the Ethiopian race consists in the length of the penis compared with that of the Caucasian race. This dimension coincides with the length of the uterine canal in the Ethiopian female, and both have their cause in the form of the pelvis in the Negro race. There results from this physical disposition, that the union of the Caucasian man with an Ethiopian woman is easy and without any in¬ convenience for the latter. The case is different in the union of the Ethiopian with a Caucasian woman, who suffers in the act, the neck of the uterus is pressed against the sacrum, so that the act of reproduction is not merely painful, but frequently non-productive.^^ The reputed perversion of the Negro that prompted him to at¬ tack white women threatened future Caucasian evolution. Self- constituted philosophers, who had endeavored to bring the Negro over the centuries into white society as an equal, lost sight of the difference in his sex-diathesis. To extend to a race, through false teaching, an egotism which should only be acquired through gradual evolvement from rational humility, is criminality to that race, wrote Pittsburgh physician English. Above all else, Amer¬ ican society needed to preserve the Caucasian woman from phys¬ ical immorality. Her body is a holy temple dedicated by God in which alone may continue the ever complicating warp and woof of evolution, and any gratification of the primitive besti¬ ality of the Negro would cause harm to the race future of the Caucasian.^® To deal with the animal passions of the Negro, some doctors prescribed castration. By that method the rapist who prided him¬ self on virility would become an object of ridicule and contempt within his own society. After castration the Negro would become docile, quiet and inoffensive.'^^ If executed, he would only be forgotten; castrated and free, he would be a constant warning and ever-present admonition to others of [his] race. A few emasculated negroes scattered around through the thickly-settled 55 The explorer Serres quoted in Paul Broca, On the Phenomena of Hybridity in the Genus Homo (London, 1864), 28. English, The Negro Problem, 472. Castration Instead of Lynching, Atlanta Journal-Record of Medicine, VIII (Oct., 1906), 457.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b18025729_0077.JP2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
