Unlike malaria, yellow fever has failed to stimulate genetic research, even though historically the black has revealed an incredible agility in sidestepping that plague's lethal scythe, a scythe which invariably chopped a wide swath through whites.

The disease is caused by a virus, injected into man by another kind of mosquito, the female Aëdes aegypti. The victim's first signal that all is not well is a general ill feeling; his features flush, he develops chills, then a high fever and quite possibly a severe head- and backache add to his distress. (Note that the symptoms to this point are sufficiently similar to a malarial attack to explain why the two were frequently confused.) Next the patient suffers through a restless, agitated two- or three-day period of high fevers and then characteristically experiences a remission. If he is fortunate, he has enjoyed (relatively speaking) a mild attack, and that is all there is to it.

If he is not fortunate, jaundice sets in a few hours later (hence “yellow” fever), the victim may hallucinate, internal hemorrhages occur, and he begins vomiting black blood (thus the Spanish appellation “vomito negro”) which “seems to gush forth without any effort from the patient.”

Thus far, the focus has been on diseases to which blacks very definitely manifested special immunities or susceptibilities. This chapter, however, which closes a survey of antebellum “Negro” diseases takes up cholera, a disease to which blacks may well have been no more susceptible than whites, but only appeared to be. Nonetheless, cholera could not be eliminated, because in appearance at least cholera unquestionably preferred black victims and not just in the United States but throughout the hemisphere.

Previously confined to Asia, with India its primordial home, Asiatic cholera, suddenly during the nineteenth century embarked, upon one deadly voyage after another, which ultimately carried the plague to most of the globe. America escaped the first pandemic that began in 1817 and invaded European Russia in 1823. The second, third, and fourth pandemics, however all moved inexorably westward toward the Atlantic and crossed over to the United States during the years 1832, 1848, and 1866.

Historically, inexperienced peoples are dealt with harshly by new diseases against which their bodies have little defense, and Asiatic cholera was definitely a new disease for Americans.

That the rate of slave child mortality was high both absolutely and relative to the white rate no one disputes. But for historians bent on portraying slaveholders as “economic men” the phenomenon has precipitated much teeth-gnashing, for it confronts directly “the strange paradox” of economic men apparently not, for a change, in pursuit of their own best interests. Nor for that matter is the image of the benign, paternalistic master enhanced by the possibility that his plantation graveyard was dominated by plots containing little black bodies.

The planter did not know biology, nutrition, and disease, however, as he knew cotton, sugar, and rice. Doubtless he could have prevented some deaths by improving the physical environment of the slaves. Yet the thrust of this chapter is that much slave mortality stemmed from nutritional difficulties that the planter was not able to understand, let alone correct.

A case has been made that because of such difficulties as lactose intolerance, problems with vitamin D, and other genetic factors, a significant portion of the slave population was seriously deprived of calcium and iron. If true, then many slave children were in severe nutritional straits, in some instances even before birth. It is true that the fetus is parasitic for these minerals, meaning that even if the mother is deficient, it will do its best to satisfy its own needs by drawing on her stores.

Thus far the focus has been on black-related disease immunities and susceptibilities. Minimal attention, however, has been paid to those individuals (black and white) who dealt daily with problems of slave health. The following section is intended to remedy this, first by providing a glimpse of the plantation health care system, and second by examining the attitudes of white physicians toward blacks within the context of their call for a separate branch of southern medicine devoted exclusively to the slave.

Postell, Genovese, and Savitt, to name but a few, have all admirably treated plantation medicine; Fredrickson and Stanton have both done marvelous work on the burgeoning scientific racism of the antebellum period, while John Duffy, among others, has demonstrated the role physicians played in the construction of southern nationalism.

The contribution of this part is in its effort to unite these various treatments within a causal framework; namely that the physicians' perception of distinctive black health problems led to the South's brand of scientific racism, which in turn fed the call for slave medicine as part of a growing southern nationalism.

Unquestionably, the evidence underlying this section is mostly impressionistic, while the presentation is interpretive. Thus some may be skeptical that the physicians relied upon are truly representative of the southern medical profession; others may feel that the role of that profession in both the development of scientific racism and southern nationalism is exaggerated.

Since World War II the black people have been studied with enormous intensity by the social scientist and the scientist alike. The reasons for the interest of the social scientist lie somewhere within the parameters of the racism of Nazi Germany (which sensitized white Americans to their own racial intolerance), the postwar groundswell of black power, a new black consciousness, and a determination of both blacks and whites to correct the pages of black history with the hope that a better understanding of the black past will bring racial accommodation.

For the scientist the African on his ancestral continent has become a subject of extraordinary interest over the past few decades as black genetic anomalies have been revealed and then linked with various forms of disease protection. Moreover, the African in America has recently come to occupy other scientists, whose attention has been riveted on black “differences” such as their inability to drink milk, problems with sickle cell anemia and hypertension, and their nutritional requirements, which may well differ substantially from those of whites.

The result is that today a huge corpus of literature covers every aspect of the Afro-American experience. The social sciences have probed exhaustively into the black's West African background, the slave trade, slavery, his postbellum adjustments to freedom and twentieth-century life. Specialized studies have concentrated on myriad problems ranging from questions of why the black was enslaved in the first place to questions of American racism to longitudinal problems of black natality and mortality levels.

Although antebellum physicians were frustrated in getting a scientific grip on the slippery question of racial origins, their postbellum successors suffered no such disability. Just prior to the opening shots at Fort Sumter the work of Charles Darwin appeared, and scarcely had the guns fallen silent at Appomattox before Josiah Nott synthesized much of the new theory with previous work on race done by the American School. Darwin's theory of evolution might create difficulties for fundamentalists for decades to come, but it proved a godsend to racists willing to interpret the Bible a bit more liberally. For Darwin made it possible to bypass the inherently heretical question of a “recent creation” to account for the black man's lack of development and return to the biblical concept of an original creation. All men had been created as one but following that creation peoples had diverged considerably in their respective evolutionary journeys-whites emerging from that journey forged and tempered-a dynamic, intellectually blessed race, while blacks were still stumbling along a trail that had led to near hopeless retardation as a member of the genus Homo, rungs behind on the evolutionary ladder.

The peculiar institution had provided a snug paternal, noncompetitive world for the black in which he thrived. But emancipation had changed all of that. Now the races were thrown together in a competitive situation, and the race least fit was, as Darwin was interpreted, inevitably doomed.

Because malarial parasites can remain alive in the body of a victim for years, malaria, unlike yellow fever, should have encountered no great difficulty in reaching the Americas. On the contrary, quite probably the disease entered the hemisphere from nearly all points on the compass, and (again unlike yellow fever whose vector required importation) most etomologists and malariologists agree that probably many appropriate species of anopheline vectors, especially Anopheles gambiae and Anopheles funestus, were on hand to abet its spread.

Given these facts, one might reasonably expect a fairly straightforward account of malaria's arrival in and progress throughout the New World. Such, however, is not the case. It has been suggested (perhaps a bit naively) that malaria's distinctive symptoms should “mark it out sharply from other febrile illnesses,” making identification of the disease in historical records a relatively easy matter. But unfortunately malaria of the past is usually entangled in a bundle of fevers along with typhus, typhoid, even cholera infantum, and yellow fever, all of which are lumped together under the vague rubrics “remittent” or “intermittent” or “bilious” fever or a combination thereof such as “bilious remittent” fever connoting different ailments to different peoples during different periods. For these reasons the date of malaria's debut in all of the Americas, and especially North America, has been the subject of not always cool and reasoned debate.

Negro susceptibilities to diseases, perhaps even more than their immunities, were instrumental in branding blacks as an exotic breed in the eyes of physicians, planters, overseers, and others in intimate contact with them. Many of these susceptibilities first came fully to light on West Indian plantations where the climate, as in West Africa, was tropical, and a lively slave trade was able to supply fresh pathogens as well as fresh bodies for the cane, coffee, and tobacco fields.

If physicians in Africa were appalled by the loathsome “morbid afflictions of the skin” such as “lepra psoriasis,” “scabies,” and “frambesia” that blacks manifested, West Indian doctors were no less repulsed by them. Frambesia (yaws) blossomed on black bodies in the warm and humid islands becoming “one of the greatest evils to which negroes are subject.” Leprosy was another hideously disfiguring disease brought by the blacks from West Africa and another that physicians believed blacks were far more “subject thereto.” Called “cacabay” (coco bay) in some islands and the “joint evil” in others because the victim's toes and fingers tended to drop off at the site of the “evil,” the disease not infrequently deprived slaves of essential appendages which in turn deprived masters of their slaves' services.

Perhaps, however, the affliction that physicians and planters found most morbidly fascinating in the islands was the black propensity for consuming nonfoods, particularly earth. The habit of chewing small amounts of clay was not unusual in West Africa yesterday (nor is it today), but it frequently became transmuted in the slave quarters from a gentle habit to a raging compulsion.

A specialist wrote recently that “the medical history of precolonial Africa is still an almost entirely unexplored field.” To this it might be added that the history of the colonial period is a barely explored field. Recorded observation is frequently scarce, often defective, and it consists almost exclusively of the observations of Europeans. The result is essentially a Eurocentric view of West Africa and its disease environment, and this view, presented in Chapter 1, may project more of a “dark continent” image than readers will care for. It should be noted at the onset that our treatment is necessarily general and that important exceptions do exist.

Yet much of the existing evidence suggests that many West Africans were the product of a particularly hostile environment which consisted more of deadly pathogens than nutritional plenty. As products of that environment, West Africans necessarily developed genetically in ways different from other peoples, and one of the purposes of this section is to discuss those differences that science has identified (or thinks it has identified) and the reasons why they came about.

Another purpose is to dramatize the extent to which the West Africans evolved defenses against some of the most deadly diseases of their environment–a purpose accomplished by reference to the differential disease experience of black and white in West Africa. Finally the nature of one set of black disease defenses – those against malaria-are discussed in terms of epidemiologic and genetic knowledge. Even this latter discussion, however, bristles with qualifications, indicative of the infancy of the study of genetics within the context of disease immunities and susceptibilities.

The binomial nomenclature of Linnaeus dominated scientific attitudes on race during most of the eighteenth century. Species were classified neatly by genus and although men might differ, they were more alike than different and certainly all of the same race. Differences were attributed to environmental factors such as a “vertical sun” which had turned the Negro black, temperate zones that colored the Caucasian white, and in-between climates that produced in-between hues.

This “environmentalism” also had the virtue of squaring with the Mosaic account of man's creation. Yet from this flowed a concept of the equality of all men that did not square with the practice of chattel slavery, particularly not in the United States, which was noisily claiming to have constituted a government on that principle.

But uncomfortable as the contradiction was, as the eighteenth century dissolved into the nineteenth, the pain was expected to be of short duration. Provision had been made for closing the slave trade in a few short years, and most states had already ceased slave importations. As for slavery itself, even its defenders described it as a “temporary evil,” while few expected the peculiar institution to outlive the demise of the slave trade for any length of time.

Descriptions of runaway slaves are replete with references to crooked or bandy legs, knocked-knees, stooped shoulders, jaundiced complexions, splotchy skin, inflamed and watery eyes, partial blindness, speech impediments, and rotten, missing, or buck teeth. Moreover, the records of over 100 estates ranging from Louisiana to South Carolina and from Florida to Arkansas suggest that the afflictions of the runaways were hardly atypical, for these data also point to a high incidence of blindness, lameness, deformed bones, skin lesions, and dental problems.

All of this is indicative of primary nutritional problems among the bondsmen. Of course nonnutritional problems were doubtless at the root of some of these difficulties. Nonethless, the frequently mentioned bone maladies point to an absence of sufficient calcium, ascorbic acid, magnesium, and/or vitamin D in the diet, while the skin, teeth, and eye complaints suggest a multiple deficiency including vitamins A, C and the B complex-in every case vitamins and minerals in which the slave diet was most likely to have been deficient.

In the last fifteen years, a rich body of historical scholarship has been published in the early history of genetics. Drawing upon the extensive manuscript collections becoming ever more available, this literature has focused on the emergence of the discipline from evolutionary biology and has given provocative attention to the celebrated dispute between the advocates of the then-competing paradigms of hereditary science – biometry and Mendelism. Indispensable so far as it goes, the existing historiography nevertheless omits approaches and subjects whose fruitfulness historians of science are, increasingly, coming to recognize. With some exceptions, the literature of genetics covers its various topics in either the United States or England but not cross-nationally. Moreover, most of the scholarship does not go much beyond treatments of the principal actors or conceptual developments. Certainly it leaves unexplored the history of the overall corps of men and women, including the scientific commoners in research, who came to form the Anglo-American genetics community. It is the aim of this review, which brings to bear upon the literature both manuscript sources and a transatlantic perspective, to suggest that making up for these deficiencies would be worthwhile and, in certain respects, is necessary.

To summarize the recent scholarship, by the 1890s many younger biologists were growing restless with phylogenetic morphology and embryology, the traditional descriptive approaches to the much-debated problems of evolutionary theory. Eager to break away from these approaches, a number of these biologists – and some older ones such as Alfred R. Wallace – called for programs of quantitative or experimental research in evolution addressed in particular to the problems of heredity and variation.

The cell as a social concept now normally refers to a unit of political organization. But the concept of an organism as a cell state, or Zellenstaat, has a neglected history associated with the rise of cell biology in nineteenth-century Germany. Professors of anatomy propagated the theory that an organism was a ‘social arrangement of parts’ both in their teaching and as a means of scientific explanation in their research. Moreover on the basis of their privileged social position many professors drew on biological theories to formulate opinions on national issues like the feminist movement, naval expansion or war strategy. German scientific achievements in cell biology may be considered as a form of nationalism, if it is accepted that social ideals were intrinsic to the scientific formulation of concepts of life.

That the theory of the cell as the elementary organism permeated other aspects of culture raises questions about the prestigious authority of science in Imperial Germany. Relations between scientific theory, institutional aspects of teaching and research, and broader social questions pose complex historical problems. German universities were to a considerable extent state financed and controlled. But academics also vociferously defended their privileges, arguing that German scientific achievements were the result of national traditions of academic freedom. The resulting conflict of interests raises the question examined here with regard to anatomy from the 1880s to 1918 at Berlin: to what extent was the theory of the cell state a response to the state's institutional control of the universities?

Even to discuss eugenics in class terms is an enterprise of which many British eugenists earlier in the century would have disapproved, since they clung tenaciously to the view that the ideology they were propounding was sanctioned by science. Eugenics, they claimed, rested upon ‘laws of biology’, which no more admitted of subjective interpretation than did the ‘law of gravity’; those who denied these laws were guilty of the same sort of anti-scientific obscurantism which, a generation earlier, had led pious Christians into seeking to deny the validity of Darwinian biology. On the other hand, some eugenists did also devote much time and energy to debating the class implications of their creed and in the course of doing this they were to elaborate a highly idiosyncratic explanation of the British social system.

At the heart of eugenics was a fear about the likely consequences of differential class fertility. Eugenists interpreted the tendency of better-off groups to have smaller families than those beneath them in the social and economic scale to mean that the ‘superior’ stocks were dying out, while the ‘unfit’ continued to multiply; this demographic process, they argued, was producing progressive racial deterioration, alarming symptoms of which could already be seen. Eugenists were concerned, therefore, to stimulate the fertility of the better stocks (‘positive eugenics’) and to take whatever steps were feasible and politically acceptable to slow down the rate of reproduction at the bottom end of the social scale, steps which might include the placing of certain diseased and degenerate groups of people under custodial care so that they could be sexually segregated (‘negative eugenics’).

This volume has its origin in the conference on ‘The Roots of Sociobiology’, held by the Past and Present Society in conjunction with the British Society for the History of Science on 29 September 1978. The volume comprises revised texts of the four main papers delivered at the conference by Harrison, Mackenzie, Searle and Norton, together with additional contributions by other participants in the conference: Durant, Dyhouse, Kevles, Sutherland and Weindling. The editor is particularly grateful to John Durant and Paul Weindling for preparing full-length contributions at relatively short notice. The brief Introduction is designed to provide a context, without in any way duplicating the contents of the volume.

As might be expected the conference was heavily subscribed and included much lively debate on controversial issues. The organizers were grateful to Professor J. Maynard Smith for representing the biologist position, and to Dr R. M. Young and members of the Radical Science Collective for their contribution and criticisms. Dr W. H. Bynum and Mr G. L'E. Turner from the British Society assisted with the organization of the meeting.

The essays by Kevles and Sutherland are to appear separately in Isis and D. Hamilton and J. V. Smith (eds.), The Meritocratic Intellect: Studies in the History of Educational Research (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1980) respectively. The editor and the Past and Present Society would like to thank the editor of The Journal of Social History for permission to reprint the essay by Dyhouse.

The index has been prepared by Penelope M. Gouk. Corpus Christi College, Oxford