How Historians' Beliefs about Race Have Influenced Histories of Racial Thought

"'Race,'" Ashley Montagu proclaimed just before midcentury in his landmark study Man's Most Dangerous Myth, "is a term for a problem which is created by special types of social conditions and by such types of social conditions alone." The concept of race, he went on, was "false and misleading," just as previous eras' fascination with "pixies, satyrs, and Aryans" had proven. In short, the concept was "mythical."¹ For those in the humanities writing in the postwar period, Montagu's claims, and those of subsequent theorists, encouraged the view that race was a social construction. By implication it made sense for scholars of race to investigate the social institutions that produced it: court decisions, congressional hearings, community associations, craft unions and the like all served as the focal points of their inquiries.² Those familiar with Howard Winant and Michael Omi's seminal study, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (1994), will know that the work's pivotal chapter is titled "The Racial State."³ Science and its attendant disciplines, while never completely absent from this immense literature, have nevertheless been accorded a marginal position within it: casualties of a belief that from 1945 on such fields had little of importance to say on the subject, and what they did have to say was certainly no more valid than opinions found in other domains. When historians of race discuss the UNESCO Statement on Race (they generally confine their attention to the first, not the second, statement of course), they frequently do so to signal the withdrawal of science from such precincts.⁴

Scholarship on the subject of sex and gender, by contrast, has taken the sciences as a core area of inquiry. That science has proven of such interest for gender theorists is due, in large part, to the enduring epistemological and political legitimacy that biology has been thought to possess over sex in American social thought. Where it became de rigueur to note that race was a social construction, sex continued to be coupled to biology, and in turn science remained an arbiter of questions about sexual inequality. Feminist interest in this domain was then an attempt to counter and qualify those facets of American society and politics that looked to science to adjudicate on issues of sexual inequality. As one scholar put it in the mid-1980s, "if feminism succeeds in modifying science, the changes will reverberate in the larger society."⁵

In the course of the last decade, resurgent interest in questions of human difference within the contemporary sciences has compelled scholars of racial thought, as well as historians of science and medicine, to reappraise their earlier assumptions. The appearance of Todd Savitt's Race and Medicine in Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century America, and Harriet Washington's Medical Apartheid: the Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, along with other recent works, attest to the renaissance the study of science and medicine is currently undergoing within scholarship on race.⁶ While these quite different accounts do much to sketch the contexts in which medicine has dealt with race, Washington's and Savitt's studies also suggest the terms on which scholars have, so far, evaluated this subject.

Spanning a publishing career of some twenty-eight years, Todd Savitt's Race and Medicine is a collection of twenty-one essays previously published by this leading historian of medicine. Arranged into four sections (disease; health-care during slavery and reconstruction; African American medical schools; and the African American medical profession), Savitt's essays convey something of the breadth of his scholarly interests, encompassing work he has contributed to the history of medicine and southern history, as...