In the decades following Reconstruction, the former slave states came to wield enormous congressional power through a voting bloc that was uniformly segregationist and overwhelmingly Democratic. “And that it may be in their power to remove it.” “They seem to forget there is a cause for every ailment,” she wrote. In 1883, she published one of the first treatises on the burden of disease in black communities. At the close of the war, she joined the Freedmen’s Bureau and worked in the freed people’s communities of Virginia.
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Crumpler was born free and trained and practiced in Boston. One of the most eloquent rejoinders to the theory of black extinction came from Rebecca Lee Crumpler, the nation’s first black female doctor.
“No charitable black scheme can wash out the color of the Negro, change his inferior nature or save him from his inevitable fate,” an Ohio congressman said. As the death toll rose, they developed a new theory: Blacks were so ill suited to freedom that the entire race was going extinct.
White legislators argued that free assistance of any kind would breed dependence and that when it came to black infirmity, hard labor was a better salve than white medicine. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative. The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. They erected more than 40 hospitals but prematurely shuttered most of them. Congress established the medical division of the Freedmen’s Bureau - the nation’s first federal health care program - to address the health crisis, but officials deployed just 120 or so doctors across the war-torn South, then ignored those doctors’ pleas for personnel and equipment. But they also feared that free and healthy African-Americans would upend the racial hierarchy, the historian Jim Downs writes in his 2012 book, “Sick From Freedom.”įederal policy, he notes, reflected white ambivalence at every turn. They worried about black epidemics spilling into their own communities and wanted the formerly enslaved to be healthy enough to return to plantation work. Despite their urgent pleas for assistance, white leaders were deeply ambivalent about intervening. Smallpox was not the only health disparity facing the newly emancipated, who at the close of the Civil War faced a considerably higher mortality rate than that of whites. They also knew that quarantine and vaccination could stop an outbreak in its tracks they had used those very tools to prevent a smallpox outbreak from ravaging the Union Army.
This pattern of affliction was no mystery: In the late 1860s, doctors had yet to discover viruses, but they knew that poor nutrition made people more susceptible to illness and that poor sanitation contributed to the spread of disease. The smallpox virus hopscotched across the post-Civil War South, invading the makeshift camps where many thousands of newly freed African-Americans had taken refuge but leaving surrounding white communities comparatively unscathed.
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