Rogues Gallery II

[Rootsie]

S.A. Cartwright American physician

Louisiana Medical Association papers (1851)

Identified a 'mental disease' called drapetomania among black slaves: 'the insane desire to run away'

  "When the unfortunate individual is subjected to punishment, he neither feels pain of any consequence...[nor] any unusual resentment more than stupid sulkiness. In some cases...there appears to be an almost total loss of feeling...
  The liver, skin, and kidneys should be stimulated to activity...to assist in decarbonizing the blood. The best means to stimulate the skin is, first, to have the patient well washed with warm water and soap; then to anoint it all over with oil, and to slap the oil in with a broad leather strap; then to put the patient to some hard kind of work in the open air and sunshine that will compel him to expand his lungs, as chopping wood, splitting rails, or sawing with the crosscut or whipsaw." (in Gould,71)

Paul Broca (1824-1880) Founded Anthropological Society of Paris 1859

Craniometry-measuring the skull and its contents-the premiere statistical method of 19th century anthropology.

(1861)

The great importance of craniometry has struck anthropologists with such force that many among us have neglected the other parts of our science in order to devote ourselves almost exclusively to the study of skulls...In such data, we hoped to find some information relevant to the intellectual value of the various human races." (in Gould,83)

Race and Gender:

  "In general, the brain is larger in mature adults than in the elderly. In men than in women, in eminent men than in men of mediocre talent, in superior races than in inferior races...Other things equal, there is a remarkable relationship between the development of intelligence and the volume of the brain." (in Gould,83)

from an encyclopedia article on anthropology: (1866)

  "A prognathus [forward jutting] face, more or less black color of the skin, wooly hair and intellectual and social inferiority are often associated, while more or less white skin, straight hair and an orthognathous [straight] face are the ordinary equipment of the highest groups in the human series,,,A group with black skin, wooly hair and a prognathous face has never been able to raise itself spontaneously to civilization." (in Gould,83-84)

A problem arose for Broca in that his own data did not bear the theory out: But all he did as in all of his career was to "shift criteria to work through good data to desired conclusions."

(1888 )

  "The man who fights for two or more in the struggle for existence, who has all the responsibility and the cares of tomorrow, who is constantly active in combating the environment and human rivals, needs more brain than the woman whom he must protect and nourish, than the sedentary woman, lacking any interior occupations, whose role is to raise children, love, and be passive." (in Gould,104)

Broca does not forget the ladies.

G. Herve,a colleague of Broca

(1881)

  "Men of the black races have a brain scarcely heavier than that of white women." (in Gould,103)

Frederick Farrar , Anglican priest, Dean of Canterbury,chaplain to Parlaiment.

The Aptitude of the Races (1866) a lecture before the British Ethnographical Society.

  "They are without a past and without a future, doomed, as races infinitely nobler have been before them, to a rapid, an entire, and perhaps for the highest destinies of mankind, an inevitable extinction.
  ...not out of all their teeming myriads have they produced one single man whose name is of the slightest importance to the history of our race. Were they all to be merged tomorrow in some great deluge, they would leave behind no other traces of their existence than their actual physical remains.
  And I call them irreclaimable savages...[because] so far as being influenced by civilization, they disappear from before the face of it as surely and as perceptibly as the snow retreats before the advancing line of sunbeams." (in Lindquist,135)

Francis Galton, Charles Darwin's cousin, geographer, founder of differential psychology, pioneer of statistics, considered 'the leading intellect of his time' (Gould, 76-77)

  "...a blinding desire to place the study of human behavior into the constellation of the rigorous natural sciences." (19)

He coined the term 'eugenics"

"I have no patience with the hypothesis...that babies are born pretty much alike...It is in the most unqualified manner that I object to pretensions of natural equality." (mugu.com/galton)

  "The most merciful form of what I ventured to call 'eugenics' would consist in natality for the indications of superior strains and races, and in so favouring them that their progeny shall outnumber and gradually replace that of the old one." (19 )

Gustave Le Bon disciple of Broca, a founder of social psychology.
                                             
(1879)

"In the most intelligent races, as among the Parisians, there are a large number of women whose brains are closer in size to those of gorillas than to the most developed male brains. The inferiority is so obvious that no one can contest it for a moment; only its degree is worth discussion. All psychologists who have discussed the intelligence of women, as well as poets and novelists, recognize today that they represent the most inferior forms of human evolution and that they are closer to children and savages than to an adult, civilized man. They excel in fickleness, inconstancy, absence of thought and logic, and incapacity to reason. Without doubt there exist some distinguished women, very superior to the average man, but there are as exceptional as the birth of any monstrosity, as, for example, of a gorilla with two heads; consequently, we may neglect them entirely." (in Gould,104-05)

E.D. Cope, America's leading paleontologist and evolutionary biologist.

(1887)

  "Two of the most prominent characters of the negro are those of immature stages of the Indo-European race in its characteristic types. The deficient calf is the character of infants at a very early age, but what is more important, the flattened bridge of the nose and shortened nasal cartilages are universally immature conditions of the same parts in the Indo-European...in some races-e.g. the Slavic-this undeveloped character persists later than in some others. The Greek nose, with its elevated bridge, coincides not only with aesthetic beauty, but with developmental perfection." (in Gould,116)

The assumption is of course that the adult white Northern European male is the standard by which all others must be compared, and ranked. The black African in all of these measures is at the lowest rung of the ladder, right alongside women.

  "Metaphysical characteristics [of women are}...very similar in essential nature to those which men exhibit at an early stage of development...The gentler sex is characterized by a greater impressibility...warmth of emotion, submission to its influence rather than that of logic; timidity and irregularity of action in the outer world. All these qualities belong to the male sex; as a general rule, at some period of life, though different individuals lose them at very various periods...Probably most men can recollect some very early period of their lives when the emotional nature predominated-a time when emotion at the sight of suffering was more easily stirred than in maturer years...Perhaps all men can remember a period of youth when they were hero-worshippers-when they felt the need of a stronger arm, and loved to look up to the powerful friend who could sympathize with and aid them. This is the 'woman stage' of character." (in Gould,117-118 )

Ernst Haekel German zoologist, a founder of Comparative Anatomy

His famous statement
"ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" means that a developing individual "passes through a series of stages representing adult ancestral forms in their correct order-an individual, in short, climbs its own family tree." (Gould,114)

The difference in races was 'proven' by 'recapitulationists' by demonstrating the 'underdevelopment' of women, blacks, and Southern Europeans.

D.G. Brinton American anthropologist

(1890)

  "The adult who retains the most numerous fetal, infantile or simian traits, is unquestionably inferior to him whose development has progressed beyond them...Measured by these criteria, the European or white race stands at the head of the list, the African or negroe at its foot...all parts of the body have been minutely scanned, measured and weighed, in order to erect a science of the comparative anatomy of the races." (in Gould,117)

G. Stanley Hall  'premier American psychologist.'

(1904)

  "This [the suicide rates of women] is one expression of a profound psychic difference between the sexes. Woman's body and soul is phyletically older and more primitive, while man is more modern, variable, and less conservative. Women are always inclined to preserve old customs and ways of thinking. Women prefer passive methods; to give themselves up to the power of elemental forces, as gravity, when they throw themselves from heights or take poison, in which methods of suicide they surpass man. Havelock Ellis thinks drowning is becoming more frequent, and that therein women are becoming more womanly." (in Gould,118 )

Paul Rohrbach

German Thought in the World (1912)

  "No false philanthropy or racial theory can convince sensible people that the preservation of a tribe of South African kaffirs...is more important to the future of mankind than the spread of the great European nations and the white race in general.
  Not until the native learns to produce anything of value in the service of the higher race, i.e. in the service of its and his own progress, does he gain any moral right to exist." (in Lindquist, 150-51)

Sources:

The Mismeasure of Man Stephen Jay Gould
Exterminate All the Brutes Sven Lindquist
Standarized Minds Peter Sacks