Skip to main content

The timeline can be navigated with the “Scroll Left” and “Scroll Right” buttons or by dragging the pointer to a date on the timeline waveform (located at the bottom of the screen on the desktop version and on the left of the screen on mobile). To filter by a particular topic and see a smaller section of the data, make a selection on the dropdown “Filters” menu or click “Search” to do a keyword search. Hover over the abbreviated filter tags in the blue boxes to see the complete name of the filter, or click a filter to display all the data with this tag. If you want to take a deeper dive into a specific topic by viewing a narrative essay page and a curated timeline, click on “Stories.”

Read More

Medical student Moses McCloud describes the "problems" facing a plantation physician.

1850

MED
RAC
SRA
BH

In his thesis, "Hints on the Medical Treatment of Negroes," McCloud states that "heroic treatments," such as bloodletting and cathartics, will strengthen a white body and weaken a Black body. For this reason, he says that all such treatment should be withheld from sick Black people so as to not "weaken" them. He calls for separate, racialized medical systems for treating white and Black patients on plantations.

This paper, like many others from medical students across the country in this era, focuses on the biological differences between Black and white bodies in regards to climate and pain tolerance. These beliefs persist to this day.