From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Samuel Adolphus Cartwright (November 3, 1793 - May 2, 1863) was a Confederate States of America physician who was assigned the responsibility of improving sanitary conditions in the camps about Vicksburg, Mississippi, and Port Hudson, Louisiana. He was honored for his investigations into yellow fever and Asiatic cholera. Cartwright was also considered to have been an antebellum authority on the health problems of African Americans, but that work has since been discredited.

Cartwright was born in Fairfax County, Virginia, to Mr. and Mrs. John S. Cartwright. Prior to 1812, he began his medical training as an apprentice to Dr. John Brewer. Thereafter, he was apprenticed to Dr. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia. He also attended the University of Pennsylvania Medical School which Rush helped to establish in 1765 with his friend Benjamin Franklin.

Cartwright was at one time a surgeon under General (later U.S. President) Andrew Jackson.

He practiced medicine in Huntsville, Alabama (Madison County), then Natchez, Mississippi (Adams County), and finally New Orleans, where he relocated in 1858.

Even though he had studied under the anti-slavery advocate Dr. Rush in Philadelphia, Cartwright contributed ideas and literature to those southerners who defended slavery. He identified two disorders at the time peculiar to slaves: (1) drapetomania, or absconding from service to the master, and (2) dysaethesia aethiopica or rascality, idleness, and indulging in improper food and drink. According to Cartwright, drapetomia is a mental disorder akin to alienation. He advocated that those slaves who showed sulky behavior be beaten. He claimed that slaves should be kept in a submissive state and treated like children, with "care, kindness, attention, and humanity to prevent and cure them from running away." The whippings intended to cure or alleviate drapetomia would also serve to suppress dysaethesia, Cartwright maintained.

In the antebellum period, southerners largely considered blacks to be racially inferior to whites. They sought "scientific proof" for their argument to counter the "human rights" claims of the abolitionists. Cartwright’s explanation concentrated on psychological issues of African America. In his Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race, Cartwright viewed blacks as people largely incapable of peforming certain duties. His arguments were in line with those of such pro-slavery defenders as Thomas Roderick Dew of the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, and James D.B. DeBow, a southern magazine publisher. In fact, Cartwright contributed some fourteen articles to DeBow's Review between 1851 and 1862, primarily on sanitary conditions.

Dr. Cartwright married the former Mary Wren in 1825, and they had at least one child. He died in Jackson, the Mississippi state capital, two months before the surrender of Vicksburg to the forces of General Ulysses S. Grant.

• "Samuel Adolphus Cartwright", A Dictionary of Louisiana Biography, Vol. 1 (1988), p. 157
• Dictionary of American Medical Biography", Vol. 1 (1984)
• Mary Louise Marshall, "Samuel A. Cartwright and States' Rights Medicine", New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal, XC (1940-1941)
• http://academic.udayton.edu/health/01status/mental01.htm
• http://cghs.dadeschools.net/slavery/defense_of_slavery/theorists/theorists.htm