Abstract
The end of Richard Towne’sTreatise of the Diseasesmost Frequent in the West Indies (1726) takes up the description of “diseases to which the blacks are no strangers, but as far as I am informed they are utterly unknown in Europe.” Given that these afflictions seemed to be limited to a single race, one might imagine that Towne had in mind some innate cause for this difference in susceptibilities. To the contrary, however, an essentialist biology mattered little for his explanation: “Those Blacks are the more subject to it,” he wrote of “the Elefantiasis under the circumstances it occurs in the West Indies,” “who after severe acute fevers, long continued intermittents, or other tedious illnesses, are either much exposed to the inclemency of Rainy seasons, and the cold penetrating Dew of the evenings, or are constrained to subsist upon bad diet and undigestible unwholesome food.” In other words, the causes of the diseases were previous maladies, poor accommodations, and a wretched diet.” As if to make clear how little race mattered to his medicine, Towne observed that Europeans who lived like the enslaved population of the islands were just as liable to the Elefantiasis as those of African descent: “Sometimes white people, whose unhappy circumstances have reduced them to hardships but little inferior to what the Blacks are obliged to undergo, have given us proof that this disease is not limited to one colour.” Compare this multiplicity of plausible causes in a non-racialised account of disease to the paucity of causal explanations in one of the few eighteenth century medical writings to center racial difference. In 1756, the South Carolingian physician John Lining put forward a description of what he termed “the American yellow fever.” This “dreadful malady” attacked almost everyone, yet it spared one group: “There is something very singular in the constitution of the Negroes,” wrote Lining, “which renders them not liable to this fever…I never knew one instance of this fever amongst them.” ‘Constitutional singularity’ would be the only cause Lining would marshal to explain this peculiar racial discrepancy in susceptibility to the disease. The vagueness and lack of detail in causal accounts of disease for racialists, compared with the multiple and explicit causes of non-racialists is my focus here. Among the reasons that race was invoked so uncommonly as a cause in eighteenth century medicine, I argue, was because, in general, race was an explanandum in the period, not an explanans. That is, naturalistic arguments in the early modern period were far more concerned with the cause of race than with race as a cause. This was even more true in medicine, where Neo-Hippocratic explanations, which invoked the power of “Airs, Waters, and Places” as well as habituation to the climate, could explain why some populations were struck and others spared without invoking essential differences. In the eighteenth century, race was a solution in search of a problem, and the problems it found were few.
