Cartwright described the disorder—which, he said, was "unknown to our medical authorities, although its diagnostic symptom, the absconding from service, is well known to our planters and overseers" In
Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race, Cartwright says that the
Bible calls for a slave to be submissive to his master, and by doing so, the slave will have no desire to run away:
Contemporaneous criticism While Cartwright's article was reprinted in the South, in the
northern United States it was widely mocked. A satirical analysis of the article appeared in a
Buffalo Medical Journal editorial in 1855. Renowned landscape architect
Frederick Law Olmsted, in
A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (1856), observed that white
indentured servants had often been known to flee as well, so he satirically hypothesized that the supposed disease was actually of white European origin, and had been introduced to Africa by traders. The contemporary southern intelligentsia regarded Cartwright as a fringe figure.
Stephen Jay Gould identified Cartwright as "a prominent Southern physician" with the caveat that Cartwright's defenses of slavery constituted "an extreme within the range of 'scientific argument'" that was not typical and likely paid little attention by "many intelligent Southerners." ==See also==