In the antebellum period, white Southerners generally considered blacks to be racially inferior to whites. They sought "scientific proof" for their argument to counter the human rights claims of the abolitionists. The Medical Association of Louisiana charged Cartwright with investigating "the diseases and physical peculiarities of the negro race". His report was delivered as a speech at its annual meeting on March 12, 1851, and published in its journal. The most sensationalistic portions of it, on drapetomania and dysaesthesia aethiopica, were reprinted in DeBow's Review. He subsequently prepared an abbreviated version, with sources cited, for Southern Medical Reports. Cartwright is most remembered for inventing, in this report, a condition he called drapetomania, or the desire to flee from servitude. According to him, drapetomania is a mental disorder akin to alienation. He said that slaves should be kept in a submissive state and treated like children, with "care, kindness, attention, and humanity to prevent and cure them from running away." If they nonetheless became dissatisfied with their condition, they should be whipped to prevent them from running away. In describing his theory and cure for drapetomania, Cartwright relied on passages of Christian scripture dealing with slavery. Cartwright also invented another 'disorder', dysaesthesia aethiopica, a disease "affecting both mind and body." Cartwright used his theory to explain the perceived lack of work ethic among slaves. Dysaesthesia aethiopica, "called by overseers 'rascality'," was characterized by partial insensitivity of the skin and "so great a of the intellectual faculties, as to be like a person half asleep." Other symptoms included "lesions of the body discoverable to the medical observer, which are always present and sufficient to account for the symptoms." According to Cartwright, dysaesthesia aethiopica was "much more prevalent among free negroes living in clusters by themselves, than among slaves on our plantations, and attacks only such slaves as live like free negroes in regard to diet, drinks, exercise, etc." — indeed, according to Cartwright, "nearly all are more or less afflicted with it, that have not got some white person to direct and to take care of them." Cartwright's Report was in line with the views of such pro-slavery defenders as Thomas Roderick Dew, of the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, and James D.B. DeBow, a Southern magazine publisher. Cartwright contributed some fourteen articles to DeBow's Review between 1851 and 1862, primarily on sanitary conditions.
Cultural depictions
Cartwright was referenced in the 2004 film . In the film, after the Confederate States of America wins the AmericanCivil War, Cartwright's work forms the basis for the fictional Cartwright Institute for Freedom Illnesses, a medical school incorporating his theory on drapetomania and other "negro peculiarities".
Cartwright is also portrayed in the 1971 Mondo exploitation filmGoodbye Uncle Tom alongside many other figures from the time. Notably, Cartwright is stated to be Jewish in the film, which he was not in reality.
