Antebellum physicians conducted painful experiments on enslaved people to prove Black-white physiological differences

Evidence

Brown, who had been enslaved on a Baldwin County, Georgia, plantation in the 1820s and ’30s, was lent by his enslaver to a physician named Dr. Thomas Hamilton. This doctor was obsessed with proving the existence of physiological differences between Black and white people, and Brown wrote about the excruciatingly painful medical experiments Hamilton put him through, until his body was disfigured by a network of scars. Among Hamilton’s concerns was determining the thickness of Black skin, which he believed was greater than the thickness of white skin. Brown explains how Hamilton applied “blisters to my hands, legs and feet, which bear the scars to this day. He continued until he drew up the dark skin from between the upper and the under one. He used to blister me at intervals of about two weeks.” This went on for nine months, Brown wrote, until “the Doctor’s experiments had so reduced me that I was useless in the field.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 970

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the J. Marion Sims material in the same chapter and to the broader 1619 claim about enslaved bodies as raw material for white institutions.