Capturing Racial Pathology: American Medical Photography in the Era of Jim Crow.

This article focuses on the untapped, complicated, fragile, and fluid visual archives of the elite White surgeon Rudolph Matas, a large proportion of which was produced during the late 19th and early 20th century, a time when he was a resident at New Orleans' Charity Hospital in Louisiana and a professor of general and clinical surgery at Tulane University's Medical Department. The article's main aim is to understand the role of visual materials in the production, uses, circulation, and impact of a form of knowledge that Matas termed "racial pathology." A small but representative sample of visual materials from the Matas collection are placed in context and examined in order to make known this untold chapter from the life story of "one of the great pioneers" in American surgery. The article reveals that many of the photographs were most significant in having been produced and assembled in parallel with the making, publication, dissemination, reception, and use of Matas' racialized medical research, in particular his influential 1896 pamphlet, The Surgical Peculiarities of the American Negro.

The development of medical museums in the antebellum American South: slave bodies in networks of anatomical exchange.

Prior to the American Civil War, museums were enthusiastically promoted in the annual circulars of southern medical colleges as valuable aids to medical education. Using case history narratives, medical college circulars, and announcements, this article examines the social origins of the region's collections of anatomical and pathological specimens and explores the professional agents and organizations responsible for their maintenance and development. The article is also concerned with exploring the racial framework in which these bodies and specimens were sourced and displayed. The social relations embodied in natural history and medical museum collections, and the emerging specialism of "negro medicine," were all elements of a context that subordinated and objectified blackness, as well as permitting and legitimizing the exploitation of black bodies. Medical museums function as a key case study for examining power relations among physicians, slaves, and slave owners, as well as underscoring southern medicine's dependence on slavery for its development.

"A dictate of both interest and mercy"? Slave hospitals in the antebellum South.

As a contribution to debates on slave health and welfare, this article investigates the variety, functions, and overall significance of infirmaries for the enslaved in the antebellum South. Newspapers, case histories, and surviving institutional records of antebellum Southern infirmaries providing medical treatment for slaves offer a unique opportunity to examine the development of modern American medicine within the "peculiar institution," and to explore a complex site of interactions between the enslaved, physicians, and slave owners. The world of the medical college hospital in South Carolina and an experimenting clinic in Alabama are reconstructed using newspapers and medical case histories. The Patient Register of the Hotel Dieu (1859-64) and the Admission Book of Touro Infirmary (1855-60) are used to highlight the types of enslaved patients sent to these two New Orleans commercial hospitals and to explore connections between the practice of medicine and the business of slave trading in the city. In addition to providing physicians with a steady income, slave infirmaries were key players in the domestic slave trade, as well as mechanisms for professionalization and the mobilization of medical ideas in the American South.

'I can do the child no good': Dr Sims and the enslaved infants of Montgomery, Alabama.

This article examines the influence of slavery and race on medical education, practice and research in the American South. Drawing on the published autobiography, case-histories, and correspondence of American slave surgeon and 'pioneer' gynaecologist, James Marion Sims, the contribution highlights a lesser known episode from his early career, namely his surgical treatment of enslaved infants suffering from trismus nascentium (neonatal tetanus). Sims became a highly prestigious figure in his later medical career, but the foundations of his success relied on the use of slave bodies and enslaved patients. These were typically distinctive features of the life of an ambitious medical professional in the slave South, where the profession profited from the institution of slavery, and human experimentation and medical research were advanced specifically through the exploitation of the region's enslaved population.