Running Away from Drapetomania: Samuel A. Cartwright, Medicine, and Race in the Antebellum South By Christopher D. E. Willoughby I n 1940, Mary Louise Marshall, then the librarian of Tulane University’s Matas Medical Library, wrote an article that has shaped the historical understanding of Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright. Though Cartwright was a prominent physician and medical writer in ante- bellum New Orleans, historians mostly remember him for his theories of drapetomania—the disease that caused slaves to run away; ras- cality—the disease that made slaves commit petty offenses; and dysaesthesia ethiopica—which made slaves “insensible and indifferent to punishment.” 1 Published in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal, Marshall’s biography of the southern physician seeded the ground for a mythology of Cartwright that has helped define him in the historiography of race and medicine. According to Marshall, Cartwright studied under the country’s most famous doctor, founding father Benjamin Rush, first as an apprentice and then at the University of Pennsylvania, but never completed the degree. With this pedigree, Cartwright appeared to be on the path to becoming a leading physician in the United States. Marshall explained that later in his career Cartwright served as “Professor of Diseases of the Negro” in the Christopher D. E. Willoughby is a postdoctoral fellow at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. 1 S. A. Cartwright, “Slavery in the Light of Ethnology,” in E. N. Elliott, ed., Cotton Is King, and Pro-Slavery Arguments: Comprising the Writings of Harper, Christy, Stringfellow, Hodge, Bledsoe, and Cartwright, on This Important Subject (Augusta, Ga., 1860), 690–728, esp. 722–24 (quotation on 723). I need to thank several people for reading and commenting on this essay. Deirdre Cooper Owens gave me valuable comments at the 2013 meeting of the American Historical Association in Washington, D.C. Without her encouragement, I probably would have abandoned this project years ago. Likewise, Randy J. Sparks, Ian Read, Jacob Steere-Williams, Steven Stowe, Andrew Wegmann, Elaine LaFay, Urmi Engineer Willoughby, Michael Sappol, Sharla Fett, and the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine’s Working Group on Medicine and Health all read drafts of this article, greatly improving it. This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number 1353086. The Journal of Southern History Volume LXXXIV, No. 3, August 2018