Professors of racial medicine: imperialism and race in nineteenth-century United States medical schools.

This article examines some of the racist features of nineteenth-century medical school curricula in the United States and the imperial networks necessary to acquire the data and specimens that underpinned this part of medical education, which established hierarchies between human races and their relationship to the natural environment. It shows how, in a world increasingly linked by trade and colonialism, medical schools were founded in the United States and grew as the country developed its own imperial ambitions. Taking advantage of the global reach of empires, a number of medical professors in different states, such as Daniel Drake, Josiah Nott and John Collins Warren, who donated his anatomical collection to Harvard Medical School on his retirement in 1847, began to develop racial theories that naturalised slavery and emerging imperialism as part of their medical teaching.

Slavery and Its Afterlives in US Psychiatry.

Antecedents of racist treatments of Black patients by the psychiatric profession in the United States affect the way they view treatment today. Specifically, in this essay, we explore the enduring consequences of racial science on various treatment practices. We examined a range of primary sources on the history of racial theories about the mind, medical and psychiatric publications, and hospitals. We contextualize this analysis by examining the secondary literature in the history and sociology of psychiatry. Through analyzing racial thinking from the antebellum through the Jim Crow periods, we show how US medicine and psychiatry have roots in antebellum racial science and how carceral logics underpinned the past and present politics of Black mental health. Changing this trajectory requires practitioners to interrogate the historical foundations of racist psychiatric concepts. This essay urges them to reject biological racial realism, which bears reminiscences to 19th-century racial science, and embrace the variable of race as a social construct to study social inequalities in health as a first step toward moving away from the legacies of past injustices in medicine. (Am J Public Health. 2024;114(S3):S250-S257. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2023.307554).