Agassiz’s daguerreotypes mark an early documented use of Black bodies as medical data.

Evidence

As a public health researcher, she was most disturbed by the fact that Renty and Delia, and the other five human beings captured in those daguerreotypes, were being treated as medical specimens. This had not dawned on me until Meredith explained that Agassiz was using their bodies to prove his theory of polygenism, and that the daguerreotypes were therefore one of the first documented examples of Black bodies being used as medical data. — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 970

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Connects directly to the ‘On Sacrifice’ article’s theme of how bodies of subordinated people become research/ritual material; also parallels the ‘Grafting’ addendum’s mode of treating people as infrastructure.
• XREF: Resonates with Harriet Washington’s ‘Medical Apartheid’ and the James Marion Sims fistula surgeries on enslaved women, both named in the adjacent paragraphs.