Ebony and Ivy (30 page)

When the Scottish philosopher David Hume contemplated human variety, he was using these kinds of sources. Historically people had managed to rise from the lowest orders of society, but “there are Negroe slaves dispersed all over Europe, of which none ever discovered any symptoms of ingenuity.” Dismissing rumors of a learned black Jamaican, Hume countered that this man was likely receiving exaggerated praise for modest achievements, “like a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly.” Race required the creation of a new global intellectual authority. Edward Long cited Hume in his 1774 history of Jamaica, concluding that science had shown an absence of intelligence in Africans.
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Thomas Jefferson agreed, adding that the most celebrated black people in his lifetime—including the young poet Phillis Wheatley—had only managed a poor aping of the genius of the white race. “Religion, indeed, has produced Phyllis Whately; but it could not
produce a poet,” he derisively commented. “The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.” Nature, not slavery, explained the intellectual inferiority of the Negro, Jefferson continued, borrowing directly from Hume and Long. Slavery in antiquity was harsher, but the most oppressed classes of ancient Rome and Greece authored great prose and verse. His condemnation of the enslavement of Indians as “an inhuman practice” was rooted in his sense of their potential for civilization. Even their rude carvings and rough drawings showed innate understandings of design and artistry. They possessed brilliance, “which only wants cultivation.” Jefferson argued that the 1774 speech of Logan, a Mingo (Ohio Iroquois), rivaled the speeches of Cicero in its eloquence, and Indians “astonish you with strokes of the most sublime oratory.” In contrast, he continued, “never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never seen even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture.”
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The Virginian judged black people ugly and artless. Beauty and passion manifested in red and white skin, but blackness was an “eternal monotony,” an “immovable veil” that covered the senses and expressions of African peoples. Jefferson's extended analysis of the bodily functions and secretions, odors, emotions and natural reactions, physicality, intelligence, and social relations of black people was borrowed from Edward Long, who had used similar arguments in deciding that black people constituted a separate species from white people, one more akin to nonhuman primates. Jefferson advanced his allegations of African brutishness with a base assertion of “the preference of the Oran-ootan for the black women over those of his own species.” Long had contended that orangutans displayed basic emotions and a rudimentary intelligence, which, he added, approximated the capacities of Africans. Male orangutans “conceive a passion for the Negroe women,” the doctor elaborated, “such as inclines one animal towards another of the same species.”
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Long and Jefferson used anatomical metaphors throughout their respective works. Eighteenth-century theorists refined evidence and arguments from a broad range of sources, often importing medical and biological jargon to form and address cultural and social questions. The Comte de Buffon's
Histoire Naturelle
, a primary
source for later researchers, assumed expertise over everything from the appearance, intelligence, and odors of varied African populations to their moral and cultural proximity to the European norm.
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The hunt to find race catalyzed a social science that could discover facts in even the casual observations of travelers.

Atlantic colleges took these myriad pieces of social information and forged “truths” about human difference. The merits of a college could be reasonably measured by its collection of human remains, a good catalogue of skulls, skeletons, and skins being a considerable advantage in a competitive academic market. The January 1764 fire that destroyed Harvard Hall took with it one of the earliest academic museums:

The entire library of five thousand volumes, excepting some two hundred that were lent out at the time, was consumed; the whole philosophical apparatus, the portraits of presidents, benefactors … were burnt up; the stuffed animals and birds, model of the
Boston
man-of-war, piece of tanned negro's hide, “Skull of a Famous Indian Warrior,” and in fact the entire “Repositerry of Curiosities,” were seen no more.

New Hampshire governor Benning Wentworth—a Harvard graduate, who later endowed Dartmouth College—and the New Hampshire legislature helped to rebuild the collection.
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The profession and hobby of collecting and exhibiting Indians spread alongside the perception of Native Americans as defeated and extinct peoples. If Dartmouth ever was an Indian college, it ceased being that when the administration began warehousing Indian remains and taking in donations to enhance its human collections. In 1797 the trustees established a medical school, and the following year Dr. Nathan Smith began lectures in Dartmouth Hall. (Smith later left to help establish the medical school at Yale College, where Bishop George Berkeley's earlier gift included a supply of texts on anatomy, surgery, and medicine.) He built a modern medical program at Dartmouth and instituted instructional dissections. “Doct[or Alexander] Ramsay is now engaged in making an
Anatomical museum for Mr. Professor Smith,” Lyman Spalding, a medical student, reported in November 1808. “We are all obliged to labour with our own hands at these preparations; in fact the rooms are an immense workshop, you see every kind of anatomical manufacturing going on.” Trained at Edinburgh, Ramsay had already produced a hundred anatomical preparations and instituted a course of anatomical demonstrations. “He is all fire and animation while speaking, chaining down your attention and carrying you along with him convincing you of the truth of his doctrines by demonstrative facts,” continued Spalding, who was excited to use his hands rather than “hearing dismal psalm tune lectures.” Amherst and other nineteenth-century colleges also established Indian museums. In Philadelphia, the scientist Samuel Morton gathered the largest assemblage of skulls on the continent.
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Colonial scholars returned from Europe and laid the foundations of American science. Samuel Bard began advocating an American academy of science similar to the royal societies of Britain and France. It was not an attempt to mirror Europe; in fact, Bard was motivated by a concern that Americans had too reflexively deferred to European science and too uncritically accepted the conclusions of European researchers. Besides the danger of learning through “hearsay,” Bard cautioned, the Americans needed a science and philosophy that addressed their “peculiar” natural and environmental realities. He predicted that scientific independence would improve the intellectual products of Europe by testing them against the realities of the Americas, give rise to new knowledge, and result in “new truths [being] discovered.” Bard's generation created this continental science. William George Nice, a Virginian who later studied under Benjamin Smith Barton at Philadelphia, heard lectures that encompassed the history of European medicine, the medical theories of and personal anecdotes about leading European scientists such as the Monros and Cullen, and correctives on this science from American researchers who had practiced in the West Indies and mainland North America and now constituted the primary authorities on color.
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By that time, Atlantic intellectuals had transformed nonwhite peoples into human curios, whose very bodies held answers to the
puzzles of society. Anatomy had generated an intellectual revolution, and the coldly intimate act of dissecting colored corpses demonstrated the social power of the academy and the temporal reach of science.

“For this purpose any healthy penis will do,” instructed Andrew Fyfe, “but large ones are generally preferred.” His primer sought to improve instruction by locating specimens that lent themselves to dissection and exhibition. “Select the hand of an aged female … that has died of a lingering disease,” reads one preparation. “The liver of a child is to be preferred to that of an adult,” goes another, “it occupying much less room.” He offered twenty-one different preparations for a fetus. Old alcoholics had the best kidneys for laboratory and classroom study, the Edinburgh anatomist continued. “Still-born children … afford a number of beautiful preparations,” he noted, while assuring students that a variety of kidneys also guaranteed a compelling public display.
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The American invasion corresponded to the ascendance of anatomical studies in the European academy. In the early fourteenth century, Mondino de Luzzi introduced instructional dissection at the University of Bologna (established 1088), where he held the chair in anatomy and surgery. By 1407 Parisian students could attend dissections, and the connections between anatomy, surgery, and medical science were firming. In Leiden and Amsterdam, Dutch surgeons raised the profile of their profession in part by establishing the value of medical dissection. In 1632 the young Rembrandt van Rijn painted
The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp
, which was commissioned by the Amsterdam surgeons guild. By the early eighteenth century, anatomy was fully entrenched in the British universities.
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Anatomy transformed surgery into an art, and dissection became the foundation of medical instruction and research in Europe.

As early as 1648 the Reverend John Eliot had observed that plantations needed anatomists to advance religious work among Indians by countering the powwows with science. The Puritan missionary
recognized the strategic benefits of spreading European science and the social rewards of allowing colonial doctors to improve their skills. Eliot did not believe that dissection would discover eternal differences or racial divisions between Indians and Christians; rather, he may have been encouraged by a contemporaneous event. Giles Firmin, a graduate of Cambridge University who became a gentleman farmer and physician in Ipswich, Massachusetts, performed a dissection for students interested in medicine. Firmin's anatomy lesson came just prior to Eliot's call for instructional dissections. In the following century, the governors of Harvard took up the task of promoting anatomy. In the summer of 1712 the trustees resolved to give the students the opportunity to dissect “once in four years Some Malefact[o]r” that the court could provide.
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A half century later, Samuel Bard jealously informed his father that two Americans, William Shippen Jr. and John Morgan, were planning a Philadelphia medical school on the Scottish model. Shippen presented the trustees of the College of Philadelphia with recommendations from the Edinburgh faculty and an endorsement from Thomas Penn. Opened in 1765, it was the first medical school in the British colonies. The faculty consisted of Shippen's contemporaries. Morgan, a graduate of Philadelphia, had apprenticed in a doctor's office and completed a four-year term as a military doctor. Benjamin Smith Barton returned to Pennsylvania to become professor of natural history. Benjamin Rush, a native of the city, joined the Philadelphia faculty after he finished Edinburgh. Rush also enhanced his wealth through a marriage to Julia Stockton, daughter of the New Jersey jurist, landowner, and slaveholder Richard Stockton, later a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Stockton gave the couple the Mount Lucas estate and mansion near Princeton. Caspar Wistar, son of the affluent German immigrant and glassmaker, attended Philadelphia and then studied medicine at Edinburgh. Wistar returned to teach anatomy, chemistry, and surgery in the medical college, where he later served as a trustee.
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But the success of medical colleges depended in part on their access to corpses, which raised the possibility of new uses for the bodies of subjugated peoples. The Philadelphia medical program began with Shippen's lectures on anatomy in 1762. On November 16
Shippen commenced his anatomy course at the Pennsylvania State House. That year the Pennsylvania Hospital gave Shippen “the body of a negro, who had committed suicide.” Five years earlier, on April 9, 1757, Tom, a black man enslaved to Joseph Wharton, became the first patient to die at the hospital. The doctors drew up policies for handling corpses and expanding opportunities for dissection. Bodies from suicides and the corpses of criminals were soon being transferred directly to Shippen's anatomical museum. The hospital also served large numbers of black patients, who became the material of its research program. Darius Sessions, a West Indies merchant and deputy governor, favored moving the College of Rhode Island (Brown) to Providence, a large town, to access the public library, excellent private collections, ample supplies and uninterrupted communications, and an abundance of physicians and anatomical authors who could enhance the students' educations.
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“In studying the art of healing we commonly begin with Anatomy,” Morgan declared in his 1765 manifesto, ranking anatomy with surgery and physic as the three pillars of medical science. In Philadelphia's medical school anatomy was a required course. Undergraduates at Harvard organized their own Anatomical Society, which procured a skeleton, hosted lectures and discussions, and performed animal dissections before the college had a medical school. Professor John Winthrop donated medical texts and specimens.
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Medical colleges proliferated in the colonies in the decades after the French and Indian War. Samuel Bard had feared that the power struggle between Anglicans and Presbyterians in New York and the advanced efforts of the Philadelphians were possibly insuperable barriers to opening a medical school in the city.

I wish with all my heart they were at New York, that I might have a share amongst them, and assist in founding the first
Physical
Med[ical] Colledge in America; I do not want ambition to prompt me to an undertaking of this kind at New York; and I have had some conversation, with my friend Mr. Martin about it, but I am afraid that being so near the Philadelphians, who will have the start of us by several years, will be a great obsticle, and another allmost
insurmountable one is the parties which exist in New York; for if such a thing was to be undertaken it ought to be in conjunction with the [King's] colledge which alone would be sufficient, to make the Presbeterian partie our Enimys.