The Pathology of Race: Disease, Formativity and the Enlightenment Debate on Human Variety

Speaker: Kevin Siena (Trent University)

IHR Seminar Series: British History in the Long 18th Century

Sooner or later virtually all contributors to the great Enlightenment debate about the causes of human variety discussed disease.  Scholarship on ailments like Yellow Fever has demonstrated how physicians deployed ideas about differential immunity to lay crucial groundwork for developing theories of biological race in the late eighteenth century.  The purchase of these ideas beyond doctors’ treatises can be seen in the work of philosophers and proto-anthropologists such as Kant, Blumenbach and Stanhope Smith (to name a few), who wove commentary on disease into their larger theories of human variety.

Rather than chart such thinkers’ claims, this talk will explore a more foundational issue. It will ask what made disease so useful for performing the eighteenth-century cultural work of race-making.  I ground the answer to that question in what I am calling disease’s “formativity,” its perceived power to change bodies in lasting, often permanent, and even hereditary ways.  We will scan a series of telling debates, including links William Harvey made between contagion and reproduction, discussions of the supposed corruptive remnants left behind by disease, theories on smallpox, immunity and inoculation, and explanations of the mechanisms of hereditary disease.  In each case we will chart in growing detail the ways that Enlightenment-era doctors presented disease not as a brief episode through which we pass, but often as a formative event that changed us – and even our children – permanently.   It was this power to craft the human form in lasting ways that rendered disease such a fruitful tool for Enlightenment race-theorists.  The talk will close by exploring the dissertations of Edinburgh medical students who took up the thorny issue of human variety and who applied these theories of pathology directly to the question.