Physicians documented Black pain-imperviousness with personal amputation anecdotes

Evidence

In the 1787 manual A Treatise on Tropical Diseases; and on the Climate of the West-Indies, a British doctor, Benjamin Moseley, claimed that Black people could bear surgical operations much more easily than white people, noting that “what would be the cause of insupportable pain to a white man, a Negro would almost disregard.” To drive home his point, in a later edition he added, “I have amputated the legs of many Negroes who have held the upper part of the limb themselves.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 965

Categorization

• SEED: The Moseley amputations anecdote is a concrete seed for an article on how ‘heroic’ self-reported clinical anecdotes were used to build racial medical doctrine — the epistemology of bad evidence.
• XREF: connects to: Researchers assess perceived pain sensitivity through fictional vignettes of foot injury. — Kurt Gray and Daniel M. Wegner, Moral Typecasting: Divergent…, 61