– by Christopher Willoughby, Ph.D.*
Over the last five years, I have spent months conducting research at the Historical Medical Library at The College of Physicians of Philadelphia. In my dissertation, I examine the history of slavery and racial science in American medical schools before the Civil War, and my research at the College of Physicians played an essential role in completing this project. One of the central tasks that I undertook at the Historical Medical Library was an intensive study of Joseph Leidy, the Professor of Anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Medical Department for much of the second half of the nineteenth century.
Joseph Leidy was born in Philadelphia in 1823. Throughout his career, Leidy made major contributions to paleontology, parasitology, and medicine. At the age of 30, he took on the position of Professor of Anatomy after the death of his predecessor William Horner. As a bit of trivia, Leidy conducted the autopsy on Horner—the Library holds a copy of Leidy’s report (pictured below). Leidy also founded the biology department at the University of Pennsylvania in 1885. In Philadelphia, and American medicine more generally, Leidy’s influence was profound.
While Leidy’s contributions to many scientific disciplines are well known—as evidence, one biography of Leidy is entitled Joseph Leidy: The Last Man Who Knew Everything—, little has been said on Leidy’s views of race and how he taught racial difference at the University of Pennsylvania. Rectifying this gap was my project at the College of Physicians, and Joseph Leidy had strong opinions on racial difference and black inferiority in particular. In studying Leidy, it is worth noting that, even though he was not an active abolitionist, he did not defend slavery. In short, Leidy did believe in white superiority, even if he did not explicitly support enslavement.
At the University of Pennsylvania, Leidy taught his students that black bodies were inherently different from whites both in intelligence and in their anatomical conformations. In 1861, Leidy published his textbook An Elementary Treatise on Human Anatomy, and this textbook represents an important piece of Leidy’s racial history. As a brief aside, the Library holds Leidy’s personal copy of his textbook, which the professor had bound in the skin of a slain Civil War soldier who fought for the Union. In his discussion of facial angles and racial difference, Leidy expressed a clear vision of white anatomical superiority. His textbook states, “In the white race, the facial angle ranges between 75° and 80°; and in the negro, between 70° and 80°. In idiots it is 65°, or even much less; and in the adult orang-outang it is about 30°” (88). In short, not only did Leidy believe that black bodies were inferior, but closer to apes. As one of the leading anatomists in the United States, Leidy’s textbook certainly carried considerable authority in American medicine.
Leidy’s textbook reflected the growing influence of racial science in medical thought. In the 1840s and 1850s, friends of Leidy produced a number of influential texts in defense of the theory of polygenesis—the belief that God created each human race separately as distinct species. In the 1850s and 1860s, Leidy received dozens of letters from Josiah Nott that evidenced both a personal and professional relationship. Nott was a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Medical Department, a prominent physician in Mobile, Alabama, and the co-author of two major scientific texts defending polygenesis: Types of Mankind (1854) and Indigenous Races of the Earth (1857). Due to his correspondence and visits to see southern friends, Leidy was no stranger to the problems of slaveholders.
After the Civil War ended, Leidy received letters from his friends complaining about the newly freed African American population. One friend wrote about freed slaves allegedly burning down his library, and Nott had to take his medical college “out of the hands of the negroes.” Friends sent Leidy racially charged letters before the war also. In 1861, a former student of Leidy’s wrote the Professor, asking how to discern anatomically whether a white person might have black ancestry for an upcoming trial. In short, Leidy’s social network and correspondence depict a man heavily invested in understanding and delineating racial difference.
Finally, Leidy’s own lecture notes tell a damning story, and draw attention to an ongoing problem in American medicine, the influence of biodeterminist ideas of racial difference. In his lecture notes, Leidy discussed the supposed differential brain size of each race (pictured above), and he also discussed race in terms of facial angles and skin. On brain weight, Leidy asserted in his notes: “Subsequent decline in races: largest in white & of there smallest in Hindoo. Smallest in negro & negroid races, especially Australian. Intermediate in others.” As a brief aside, Leidy wrote all of his notes on scraps of paper such as old lecture cards or even invitations. In one case, he wrote his lecture on the anatomy of the penis on the back of an old dinner invitation from Walt Whitman (pictured below). Leidy’s lecture cards on race were from various periods, showing that, even as he updated his lectures in the postbellum period, his commitment to biodeterministic racial difference persisted. Leidy’s lectures evidenced the growing influence of these racial ideologies on medical theory and medical training. The example of Joseph Leidy predates by decades many of the most famous cases of race-based medicine such as the forced sterilizations of working-class white women and women of color as well as the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments.
The research I conducted at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia proved essential to my dissertation, and I am already planning further trips to the College as I complete my book manuscript. The Historical Medical Library not only provides insights into the history of medicine in early America, but also the development of racial ideology, the enlightenment, and even the condition of slaves in colonial Philadelphia. In short, the College of Physicians has resources germane to not only the history of medicine but also the social and cultural history of the United States.
*Christopher Willoughby earned his Ph.D. in English from Tulane University in 2016. He received a Fellowship from the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine in 2015.