Christopher D. E. Willoughby is a historian of slavery and medicine in the United States and Atlantic World
academic writing
Books under contract
Masters of Health: Racial Science and Slavery in American Medical Schools (University of North Carolina Press)
In Masters of Health, I am telling the untold story of how racial thinking became systematically incorporated into medical education well before the rise of eugenics. Specifically, I relate how white medical professors constructed a curriculum around the belief that people of African descent were anatomically distinct and immune to the worst ailments of slave societies. As well as a history of racial theory, Masters of Health also relates how physicians utilized racist practices: stealing cadavers of African descendants for dissection, experimenting on enslaved patients, and appropriating human remains created through the violence of slavery and empire for their museums. Finally, Masters of Health relates the story of people who were caught up in medical schools’ webs of violence, such as an unnamed leader from Brazil’s largest slave revolt and two children from El Salvador Maximo and Bartola, who were bought as children in El Salvador, human trafficked to Boston, and displayed in popular exhibits and discussed in Harvard’s anatomical theater.
Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery, editor with Sean Morey Smith (Louisiana State University Press)
Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery is a collection of essays about the formative role of slavery in shaping the various healing traditions of the Atlantic World, including European cosmologies such as medicine but also examining how slavery affected African diasporic approaches to healing such as Voodoo and Condemblé along with the hidden impacts of Taino healing. With essays from leading and junior scholars alike, this volume takes stock of the past and future of studying the history of medicine and healing in the age of slavery, revealing how medicine was just one of many healing cosmologies in the Atlantic World. Likewise, this volume covers the breadth of the Atlantic, with essays on the Anglo, Dutch, Franco, Iberian, and Lusophone Atlantic Worlds.
published Journal articles
“Running Away from Drapetomania: Samuel A. Cartwright, Medicine, and Race in the Antebellum South.” The Journal of Southern History. 2018
“Running Away from Drapetomania” rethinks the antebellum New Orleans physician and enslaver Samuel A. Cartwright, arguing that understanding his ideas’ (and race science’s more generally) negative influence on American culture, requires recognizing how this type of thinking was normative to American medicine in the nineteenth century.
“‘His Native, Hot Country’: Racial Science and Environment in Antebellum American Medical Thought.” The Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. 2017
“His Native, Hot Country” relates how concepts of the environment changed over time in early American medical thought about race. In the late colonial and early national periods, physicians saw climate as creating and shaping racial differences, where all people were healthiest in temperate climates. By the end of the antebellum period, however, physicians argued that each race was specifically suited for health issues of different climates. In practice, then, by the time of the U.S. Civil War, physicians advocated for the white supremacist notion that people of African descent were healthiest under the condition of slave labor in the tropics.