A Dose of Law

Abstract

This chapter argues that disability was central to the production of racialized medical knowledge in the antebellum years. As white southern physicians professionalized, they constructed racial discourses that dovetailed with disabling legal fictions of blackness. The criminal, property, and manumission laws of slavery analogized blackness and disability by overemphasizing the state of enslaved people’s bodies, while slave codes metaphorically “handicapped” blacks in society through pass laws, literacy laws, and the denial of citizenship rights. Samuel Cartwright, Josiah Nott, and others borrowed from this legal lexicon and invented new conditions and theories of black abnormality. Enslaved women, sexuality, reproductive health, and the imagined link between hereditary defects and racial inferiority played a major role in these conversations and positioned physicians as “experts” of black bodies.