Christopher D E Willoughby | University of Nevada, Las Vegas (original) (raw)
I am a historian of medicine and Atlantic slavery, and Assistant Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies in the Department of Interdisciplinary, Gender, and Ethnic Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. I am also a Visiting Fellow in the University of Pennsylvania's new study "Penn Medicine and the Afterlives of Slavery." I am the author of the book Masters of Health: Racial Science and Slavery in U.S. Medical Schools (University of North Carolina Press, 2022). Additionally, with Sean More Smith, I am the editor of the book, Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery (Louisiana State University Press, 2021). My research, then, interrogates how slavery and racism has shaped some of the most influential institutions in American medicine, most notably medical schools. Recently, my research has been in The Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (July 2017) and The Journal of Southern History (August 2018), and Charting the Plantation Landscape from Natchez to New Orleans (Louisiana State University Press, 2021). With Richard Price, I co-authored an article on a Harvard professors 1857 visit to the Saamaka maroons in Suriname, to be published at the end of 2019 in the New West India Guide. I am also an active public scholar, having been interviewed for multiple podcasts and written for blogs and a national newspaper. Previously, I was a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Pitzer College, a Visiting Faculty Fellow in the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, the Molina Fellow in the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences at the Huntington Library, a Visiting Fellow in the Pennsylvania State University's Center for Humanities and Information, a longterm fellow in the Schomburg Center's Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery, and a postdoctoral fellow at Emory University's Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. My research has garnered grants from the National Science Foundation, Harvard University, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, the Virginia Historical Society, and the Consortium for the History of Science Technology of Medicine.
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Papers by Christopher D E Willoughby
American journal of public health, Mar 1, 2024
University of North Carolina Press eBooks, Nov 7, 2022
Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences
Medical history, Apr 1, 2024
This article examines some of the racist features of nineteenth-century medical school curricula ... more This article examines some of the racist features of nineteenth-century medical school curricula in the United States and the imperial networks necessary to acquire the data and specimens that underpinned this part of medical education, which established hierarchies between human races and their relationship to the natural environment. It shows how, in a world increasingly linked by trade and colonialism, medical schools were founded in the United States and grew as the country developed its own imperial ambitions. Taking advantage of the global reach of empires, a number of medical professors in different states, such as Daniel Drake, Josiah Nott and John Collins Warren, who donated his anatomical collection to Harvard Medical School on his retirement in 1847, began to develop racial theories that naturalised slavery and emerging imperialism as part of their medical teaching.
Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Jun 8, 2022
Early American Literature, 2021
Slavery & Abolition, Apr 2, 2020
Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Apr 1, 2019
Civil war book review, 2018
In Antebellum Posthuman: Race and Materiality in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, University of Missis... more In Antebellum Posthuman: Race and Materiality in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, University of Mississippi Professor of nineteenth-century literature Cristin Ellis troubles historical depictions of the relationship between materialism and racism in the mid nineteenthcentury United States. Through an analysis of the anti-slavery writings of Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, Ellis argues that these writers used materialist conceptions of the human body to argue against slavery and white supremacy. In making this argument, Ellis seeks to undercut simplistic depictions of antebellum racial discourse as pitting liberal humanists against biological racists. Through this analysis, Ellis restores an antebellum precedent for anti-racist materialism. Ultimately, Ellis intends to add anti-racist and social justice theorizing to posthumanism's toolbox, and, as Ellis argues, Douglass, Thoreau, and Whitman already have created a profound anti-racist materialism.
Social history of medicine, Feb 8, 2018
Social history of medicine, May 3, 2016
The Journal of American History, Dec 1, 2020
New West Indian Guide, Dec 5, 2019
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC-BY-NC 4.0 License.
American journal of public health, Mar 1, 2024
University of North Carolina Press eBooks, Nov 7, 2022
Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences
Medical history, Apr 1, 2024
This article examines some of the racist features of nineteenth-century medical school curricula ... more This article examines some of the racist features of nineteenth-century medical school curricula in the United States and the imperial networks necessary to acquire the data and specimens that underpinned this part of medical education, which established hierarchies between human races and their relationship to the natural environment. It shows how, in a world increasingly linked by trade and colonialism, medical schools were founded in the United States and grew as the country developed its own imperial ambitions. Taking advantage of the global reach of empires, a number of medical professors in different states, such as Daniel Drake, Josiah Nott and John Collins Warren, who donated his anatomical collection to Harvard Medical School on his retirement in 1847, began to develop racial theories that naturalised slavery and emerging imperialism as part of their medical teaching.
Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Jun 8, 2022
Early American Literature, 2021
Slavery & Abolition, Apr 2, 2020
Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Apr 1, 2019
Civil war book review, 2018
In Antebellum Posthuman: Race and Materiality in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, University of Missis... more In Antebellum Posthuman: Race and Materiality in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, University of Mississippi Professor of nineteenth-century literature Cristin Ellis troubles historical depictions of the relationship between materialism and racism in the mid nineteenthcentury United States. Through an analysis of the anti-slavery writings of Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, Ellis argues that these writers used materialist conceptions of the human body to argue against slavery and white supremacy. In making this argument, Ellis seeks to undercut simplistic depictions of antebellum racial discourse as pitting liberal humanists against biological racists. Through this analysis, Ellis restores an antebellum precedent for anti-racist materialism. Ultimately, Ellis intends to add anti-racist and social justice theorizing to posthumanism's toolbox, and, as Ellis argues, Douglass, Thoreau, and Whitman already have created a profound anti-racist materialism.
Social history of medicine, Feb 8, 2018
Social history of medicine, May 3, 2016
The Journal of American History, Dec 1, 2020
New West Indian Guide, Dec 5, 2019
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC-BY-NC 4.0 License.
MW 2:30-3:45 Office Hours: MW 11-12 or by appointment Spring 2020 Race and Medicine in U.S. Histo... more MW 2:30-3:45 Office Hours: MW 11-12 or by appointment Spring 2020 Race and Medicine in U.S. History Af. Am 497I/Hist. 497I By the end of this course, you should be comfortable discussing how American physicians approached race from the colonial period to the present, as well as the response of everyday people to those unequal practices. Moreover, this class urges us to think about medicine as not simply the product of objective science, but as a set of practices influenced by and influencing the culture of the United States. This course argues that medical practice, medical thought, and public perception of the medical profession are contingent on the interaction of the American populace and the health sciences. In this sense, physicians and patients should be understood as consumers and producers of medical racial ideologies. As well as analyzing the history of medical racism, we also will study how people sought to reform medicine and even revolted against it. We will track the long relationship of distrust and opposition to the white medical professionals, studying cases such as formerly enslaved people exposing inhumane experimentation on plantations in their slave narratives to the construction of black hospitals at the turn of the twentieth century and into the present. To build an understanding of the historical relationship between medicine and race, we will spend much of the course steeped in primary and secondary sources (Ask about what these are, if you are not sure. The humanities think about this distinction differently than the sciences J) which considers various aspects of race in American medicine. These works will look at the roles of identity, discrimination, and the means of distributing medicine in shaping health