Antebellum medicine pathologized enslaved people’s desire to escape as a disease

Evidence

Most outrageously, Cartwright maintained that enslaved people were prone to a “disease of the mind” called drapetomania, which caused them to run away from their enslavers. Willfully ignoring the inhumane conditions that drove desperate men and women to attempt escape, he insisted, without irony, that enslaved people could contract this ailment when their enslavers treated them as equals, and he prescribed “whipping the devil out of them” as a preventive measure. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 968

Categorization

• CANDY: ‘Drapetomania’ — the invented disease of wanting to run from slavery — is a grimly memorable party fact.