The New England Journal of Medicine and Surgery and the Collateral Branches of Science published its first issue in January 1812. Even though slavery had been abolished in Massachusetts in 1783, its legacies there lingered for decades. Slavery remained legal in the United States until 1863 and shaped every aspect of American life, medicine included. The word “slavery” first appeared in the Journal in 1813, in a tribute to Benjamin Rush that highlighted his writings opposing slavery. But the Journal’s relationships to slavery and racism were complicated. Its founders’ families had profited from slavery. Its authors wrote casually about slavery. And it provided a prominent forum where physicians perpetuated race hierarchies before and after the Civil War.
It is essential that this complicity be recognized. The Journal’s engagement with slavery illustrates how medical theories, practices, and institutions influenced, and were influenced by, social and political injustices. The effort to reckon with this history must be sincere, deliberate, and persistent.
No single essay can say all that should be said about slavery and medicine, and some condemnable past writings should not be republished. This article is not the last word: it is an invitation to further exploration and intervention.
Slavery, Racism, and Medicine in the 19th Century
British colonists first brought enslaved Africans to Virginia in 1619. They also enslaved Indigenous Americans. The 1810 census counted nearly 1.2 million enslaved people in the United States, and the enslaved population reached nearly 4 million by 1860. Physicians benefited in many ways. They owned slaves, worked on slave ships and plantations, and used the bodies of enslaved people in medical education and research.
In 1812, two Boston physicians, John Collins Warren and James Jackson, launched the Journal. They recruited other physicians to join them, including Walter Channing. Warren’s father had invested in the Middlesex Canal, which was designed to facilitate shipments of rum, sugar, molasses, cotton, timber, and food as part of the trade that tied New England to slavery. Jackson and Channing came from wealthy merchant families whose members had owned enslaved people and profited from trade with southern and Caribbean plantations. Even though these men did not own enslaved people or participate directly in the trade, and even though Channing spoke publicly against slavery, they benefited from slavery in inheriting wealth from their fathers and fathers-in-law. The Journal, like the New England economy, was thus bound to slavery.