Diagnosing Freedom
Black People Get Sick When They Are Free, And Other Lies and Last Ditch Attempts to Stop Emancipation
In the year 1840, Dr. Edward Jarvis broke his leg. He found his bed rest to be dull. So dull, that that to pass the time, he began to read that year’s federal census. He quickly found it to be riddled with statistical and numerical errors. This was concerning, because this was the first time in the country’s history that the mentally ill were counted. Dr. Jarvis was trained specially in statistics and mental illnesses, which proved very useful in his quest to figure out what the true 1840 census should have looked like. And that could have been the end of that. A bored doctor, a busted leg, and a bunch of paper.
However. Dr. Edward Jarvis had helped found the American Statistical Association the year before. He was also a respectable White man in Concord, Massachusetts who people would likely listen to. And this was no basic census. The contents of the census had already sent the country roiling, as it declared phenomenal numbers of clinically insane people, who all mostly happened to be free Black people. The rates of insanity among White citizens and enslaved Black citizens were next to nothing compared to what seemed to be a rampant mental breakdown among a community that had started to experience liberty. The census, seemingly made from objective federal government standards showed the country what pro-slavery advocates had said all along: Black people were mentally and physically inferior and the system of slavery provided structure and care for them that kept them from completely losing their minds.
One Dr. Peter Bryce had even succinctly put his answer down after examining a manic patient- John Patterson- whom he had formerly owned. He knew exactly what had made him “mad”. He simply wrote, “Diagnosis: Freedom”
This census was delivered to an America that was simmering socially and politically. Across the world, human chattel slavery had declined, leaving the USA standing mostly alone in its defense. The Northern states had a growing industrial economy that now did not depend on cheap, outsourced Southern labor. States across the country harbored more and more resentment towards the South’s political power garnered by the “three-fifths clause” ( three out of every five slaves were counted when determining a state's total population for legislative representation and taxation).
The Southern economy depended on an unpaid labor force, so all this unrest of slave rebellions and talk of freedom jarred legislators and Southern enslavers.
The medical establishment’s claim that African Americans ( and anyone deemed “Black” through “one drop” of “Black” blood or mixed) were inherently intellectually and physically inferior was becoming a source of derision around the globe. This census seemed to be a final argument of sorts in defense of an institution that was coming under attack. Freedom, this census, showed, simply was not good for Black people. Freedom for the enslaved was also very bad for White people, according to the “science”, as Black people were considered the source of much disease and illness. If Black people were running around all free and allowed to go where they please, the logic was that they would cause massive health crises and everyone would die. It was very serious.
The census ticked off a host of issues that Black people suffered, but even this information was used to blame the inherent inferiority of anyone descending from anywhere in the continent of Africa and completely ignored the suspicious structural elements of the American legal system, and societal access to good food, freedom from White supremacist terrorism, safe access to doctors and healthcare, and generations of physical and emotional trauma that affected the community. The actual laws and traditions that created the problems for a group of people were not even factored into understanding the health crises of the demographic.
All sorts of doom and gloom made headlines, as dire predictions of what would “happen” to the deeply “inferior” free Blacks circulated. Once a festive sight in the circus, the “White Negro” now loomed as a specter of incoming societal collapse. There was the warning that the mixed children were infertile like mules, and if anyone of African descent did have children, those children would be weak and die quickly. There was a claim that Black people had only until the year 2000 before they would go extinct. It was critical that this pesky call to freedom be pushed back, as Black people would supposedly not survive without their enslavement.
Harriet Washington makes sure to note in this chapter that this wild double standard was one of the key initial arguments for slavery. The supposed strength and hardiness of the Black body as opposed to the sensitive, delicate White one had been a useful excuse for enslavement for centuries. The argument had been made mythically and by scientific racists that the Black body was tough, rugged, withstood pain better than others, and could be employed to sustain an entire multi-billion dollar economy. But now, the argument was completely flipped. Black people suddenly were “physically weak and inferior” and incapable of making good choices. They were too weak to bear good children and they apparently would all go extinct - as mentioned above- by the year 2000. They were too sickly of a “race” to procreate with. The world would one day be rid of the “Black scourge” of inhumanity that had apparently “plagued” the very people who got wildly wealthy and found the majority of their health care cures off of them.
Dr. James McCune Smith of Harvard also read the great 1840 census. Dr. Smith also happened to be a member of the American Statistical Association and a statistical expert. He had been educated in Glasgow, Scotland as his Blackness was not allowed in the medical schools in America he applied to. He came back to his country and Harvard and analyzed the same data Dr. Jarvis did and found the census data to be alarming and odd. He found the data-collecting methodology for the Southern populations to be deeply, awfully flawed.
The doctors discovered towns where the population of Black people didn’t even match the census, such as the town where there were only three Black people, but six were listed and marked as “insane and idiots”. They found example after example where the Black populations were written down as free when they were not, where there were more where there were none, and where mentally well Black people were counted among the clinically insane White citizens. Numbers of population counts often depended on the enslaver self-reporting their enslaved count or census takers simply eyeballing a group and deciding someone was “Black”. Washington reminds us that there was a good-sized population with a mixture of European, Native American, and African ancestors, the census didn’t bother to parse. Dr. Jarvis cataloged all the issues with the census and at Harvard Dr. Smith began to hold lectures on just how false and dangerous this census was. Washington writes that this did not stop the coming emancipation, but it revitalized slavery to last well into the 1860s.
The impact of the “hard cold data” on the law and general culture was obvious and immense. It helped set descendants of African enslaved people back for generations because shaking off the “idiotic and insane” myth among both the common public and an already hostile medical establishment would prove difficult. As in every single chapter of Medical Apartheid, Chapter Six Diagnosis: Freedom, warns of the way data can be warped to say anything anyone needs, and how who collects data, and how that data is collected deeply matters. I would also like to add that there are often a lot of head-shaking “can’t believe in this day in age” responses -which we all participate in -when hearing of modern-day examples of discrimination or bias against people believed to be Black. What I hope Harriet Washington’s work does is put today into context. That it will no longer be so wild to believe because the roots of these racist myths will be so well known that we can spot its fruit when we see it.