Introduction

Several years ago, Yale University “embarked on a journey to understand better our university’s history—specifically Yale’s formative ties to slavery and the slave trade.” The  findings of that work as well as the resulting book by David W. Blight, Sterling Professor of History and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale, appear at https://yaleandslavery.yale.edu/. As this work took shape, Deputy Dean Darin Latimore and I reached out to John H. Warner, PhD, Avalon Professor in the History of Medicine and Professor of American Studies and of History, and chair of our outstanding History of Medicine department, to discuss how we might explore Yale School of Medicine’s relationship with slavery. I asked Professor Warner to focus on the period of the 19th century beginning with the founding of the school as the Medical Institution of Yale College in 1810, as the history of 20th-century racism at Yale School of Medicine and ties to eugenics are already subjects of investigation. Over just one year, Professor Warner and postdoctoral fellows Liana DeMarco, PhD, and Sean Morey Smith, PhD, uncovered previously unknown history of our school and its alumni. With advice and guidance from those who appear in the acknowledgement section, the authors created the work presented on this website.

The work highlights the complexity of ties to slavery among the early leaders of the Medical Institution of Yale College and the pervasive use of anecdote and pseudoscience at Yale and other medical schools of the 19th century to attribute biological differences to race. As the authors point out, this racism has had a long-lasting impact on medicine. How could medical scientists so easily embrace misconceptions about race?  The answer, I fear, lies in the human inclination to objectify others unknown to us, a penchant we each must guard against every day.  As we reject “racial tropes” of the past, we must take care not to adopt new racist assumptions. As we reject pseudoscience, we must not deny legitimate scientific approaches to understanding the molecular, environmental, and social bases for health disparities. Only by developing and rigorously testing unbiased hypotheses will we eliminate health inequities. This is the rationale for the creation of the Office of Health Equity Research, led by Associate Dean Marcella Nunez-Smith.

The paucity of first-hand accounts by individuals important to the history of the school is striking and makes it difficult to interpret their actions and experiences. We know nothing of Dean Charles Hooker’s motivation to provide medical care for the Africans of La Amistad or what impact that experience had on his views of race, for example.  We know very little about Courtland van Rensselaer Creed’s experience as the first person of African descent at Yale School of Medicine, or his subsequent experience as a practicing physician in New Haven. One hungers to learn more and to seek advice as we strive to execute on our mission statement and strategic plans to create “an environment where all can thrive.”

Perhaps most disturbing are the accounts of Yale School of Medicine alumni who, after completing their medical education, embraced the institution of slavery with vigor. It is easy to dismiss their actions as the actions of individuals that do not reflect on the school, but this history must raise questions about how we instill values, and indict at least the process of student selection. Today, Yale School of Medicine and other schools of medicine consider character in the selection of students. Our students commit to an oath during the White Coat Ceremony on the first day of classes, and we emphasize medical ethics and professionalism in the curriculum. Nevertheless, our students sometimes experience a “hidden curriculum,” as they complete their clinical training. We must continue to address the racism and behaviors that give rise to this “curriculum,” and hold ourselves accountable.

It is tempting to look away, but we must understand and confront the past of our school to change its future. The work of DeMarco, Smith, and Warner represents the first installment of what I hope will be a robust and growing body.  This may not be the definitive text, but it should inspire curiosity and further investigation through which our understanding will grow.

Nancy J. Brown, MD 
Jean and David W. Wallace Dean of Medicine
C.N.H. Long Professor of Internal Medicine

Welcome to the exhibition

This website is a product of a one-year pilot research project conducted in 2022-2023 that explored the entanglements of Yale School of Medicine—chartered in 1810 and opened in 1813—with the institution of slavery and with racism.  Intellectual, financial, and pedagogical ties to slavery and the ideology of white supremacy forged before the Civil War have had consequential afterlives in the teaching and learning of medicine today. Beginning to claim our past in full—including its disturbing resonances in the present—is one essential step toward the larger processes of racial reckoning and repair that Yale, like so many other universities, has recently begun to embrace. 

The research team set out to investigate:

Our research found that the culture of slavery and the ideologies of racism were infused into the fabric of a medical school located in a New England port city engaged in Atlantic and West Indian trade networks, many of which were connected to slavery.

We offer here a collection of historical essays that exemplify the kinds of connections between Yale School of Medicine and slavery that our research revealed. The first, presented as a short video, recounts how in 1836 a Yale medical student and some of his classmates stole the body of a Black sailor who had been stabbed to death and then hauled his body across the breadth of New Haven to the medical school’s dissecting room, undeterred by the “threats and blasphemy” of the “rabel” who protested. Two essays then explore how faculty and student financial ties to slavery helped to fund the newly founded medical school and to pay the expenses of some of the medical students who came from enslaving societies like the U.S. South, Cuba, and Brazil. The next vignette looks at the engagement of alumni with slavery, including Connecticut-born medical students who after graduation moved to the South where they became not only enslavers themselves but also prominent figures in the South’s pro-slavery medical intelligentsia.

Turning to the curriculum, the next essay examines just how pervasive racism was in medical teaching and learning at Yale. Often it was presented with a dearth of elaboration, suggesting that many of the ideas about the medical meanings of racial difference and the medicalization of Blackness were regarded as self-evident—so widely shared that they did not need special comment. The vignettes that follow explore the medical care of Black patients—including Black sailors from the West Indies—and the handful of Black medical students who studied at Yale during the antebellum period, including two students from Liberia who had not before been recognized in histories of the medical school, as well as the relationship of the faculty and students to anti-slavery, abolitionism, and Liberian colonization.  

The final vignette presents suggestive traces of a Black family living and working in the medical school’s one and only building. The same vignette examines scattered references to the school’s anatomical museum—a collection that has seemingly vanished—which most likely was one site of racial pedagogy.  Throughout all of the essays, we draw attention to and often reproduce some of the archival sources that afford our portal into the past.

Much of what we recount is sobering, disturbing, and emotionally freighted. This discomfort is an integral part of the process of seeking to acknowledge honestly and bear witness to our institution’s past. At stake in reckoning with that past is a better understanding of the ways in which our institutions are sources of inequality and how our history of racism and the infrastructures of white supremacy affect medical education, research, and clinical practice today. We are all too aware of the limits of what has been possible in this one-year pilot project. Our hope is that this research will be a springboard to a sustained engagement with the unsettling complexity of this history that, not least of all, will be integrated into medical education in an ongoing way.

Liana DeMarco, PhD
Sean Morey Smith, PhD
John Harley Warner, PhD
November 2024

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