The New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal

[4][5] Physicians of the Antebellum South widely argued that racial disparities between Africans and Caucasians required medical treatments unique to African-Americans.

While moderate Southerners remained skeptical of extreme constructions of disease and race, most generally believed in the need for the specialized treatment of African slaves.

[7] During the 1853 New Orleans yellow fever outbreak, Louisiana-based medical publications were reluctant to acknowledge the presence of the disease, fearing the repercussions of a quarantine on trade.

Dowler, who found New Orleans’ population receptive of his experimentation, utilized cholera and yellow fever epidemics to supply the necessary cadavers.

Dowler also violated the consensus of the medical community by advocating his own theory of “diffused sensorium” that opposed centralized models of the nervous system developed by Charles Bell and Marshall Hall.