Drapetomania

Johannah Latchem

• Read more

  ‘Drapetomania’, named by the American physician Samuel Cartwright in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal, 1851, was a form of mania supposedly affecting enslaved people in the 19th century: an uncontrollable impulse to run away from their white enslavers, preventable by whipping. This work addresses how the word perpetuated the system of enslavement by legitimising it through a medical term, conditioning thinking across the wider population, and pathologising the human subject. It resonates with 20th‑century instances of individuals wrongly consigned to asylums, sometimes for no legitimate reason, and raises questions of what maintains these system