Josiah Nott argues that Southern climate is ideal for plantation slavery.
Date: 1857
Nott, a white physician in Mobile, Alabama, publishes “Acclimation; or, the Comparative Influence of Climate, Endemic and Epidemic Diseases, on the Races of Men." It will become an influential and popular essay in Southern medical communities. Focusing on the relationship between medicine and climate, he states that bodies work best in their "natural" climates. He uses this theory to explain why "the South was an ideal space for plantation slavery, fit for the occupational health of each race’s role" (Willoughby, 2017).