Dysaesthesia aethiopica

Today, dysaesthesia aethiopica is not recognized as a disease, but instead considered an example of pseudoscience,[1] and part of the edifice of scientific racism.

[2] Applied exclusively to African Americans, dysaesthesia aethiopica – called rascality by the overseers – was characterized by partial insensitivity of the skin and "so great a hebetude of the intellectual faculties, as to be like a person half asleep.

[6]Author Vanessa Jackson has noted that lesions were a symptom of dysaesthesia aethiopica and "the ever-resourceful Dr. Cartwright determined that whipping could ... cure this disorder.

"[7] According to Cartwright, after the prescribed "course of treatment" the slave will "look grateful and thankful to the white man whose compulsory power ... has restored his sensation and dispelled the mist that clouded his intellect.

"[8] He explicitly dismissed the opinion which assigned the causes of the "problematic" behaviour to the social situation of the slaves without further justifications: "[The northern physicians] ignorantly attribute the symptoms to the debasing influence of slavery on the mind."