Heading: (African-American - 1846 first African-American M.D. on slave longevity)
Author: Smith, James McCune, M.D.
Title: 1st African-American M.D. debunks myth of slave longevity
Place Published: NY
Publisher:
Date Published: April-May, 1846
Description:

Smith, James McCune, M.D. “The Influence of Climate on Longevity: with Special Reference to Life Insurance” on Pp. 319-329 and 403-418 of The Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review / Conducted by Freeman Hunt (complete Volume XIV, April-May, 1846) First printing of this essay. Original binding, black leather spine with gilt lettering, marbled boards.

The mundane title belies the fact that the author, the first African-American to receive a medical degree (from a Scottish university), here used pioneering methods of statistical analysis to debunk the myth that southern Black slaves lived longer than free Blacks in the north because they were so well-treated by their “masters”. Smith was himself born a freeman of mixed race in New York.  While running the first African-American pharmacy in the United States and serving as Doctor of the Colored Orphan Asylum in Manhattan, he was active in the anti-slavery movement – Frederick Douglass considered him a mentor – as well as in various American scientific societies. In the 1840s, he began to lecture on race and slavery and to write articles using scientific methods to refute racist ideas about Black “inferiority”. (A copy of Dr. Smith's rare 1860 call for Black voting rights during the Lincoln presidential election sold in these Galleries earlier this year)

 

Some slight wear, ex-library copy but generally very good