Acknowledgements
This project owes its inception to Nancy J. Brown, MD, Jean and David W. Wallace Dean of Yale School of Medicine. We are grateful for her support, which included one year of funding in 2022-2023 for the project’s two postdoctoral research associates. Darin Latimore, MD, Deputy Dean and Chief Diversity Officer of Yale School of Medicine, was our advocate and guide from start to finish, and we are deeply grateful for the many ways in which he championed this project. Additional funding was provided by the Yale School of Medicine Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and by the School of Medicine’s Section of the History of Medicine.
We are grateful to the members of the project steering committee for their support and advice: Sakena Abedin, MD, PhD; Nientara Anderson, MD; Deborah Coen, PhD; Melissa Grafe, PhD; Chinye Ijeli, MD candidate; Darin Latimore, MD; Joanna Radin, PhD; Marco Ramos, MD, PhD; Anna Reisman, MD; Carolyn Roberts, PhD; and Naomi Rogers, PhD.
We are particularly indebted to Carolyn Roberts, PhD, who in the early planning stages of this project helped map out a chart to square our course, and to Christopher Willoughby, PhD, whose knowledge of the relationship of medicine to slavery in the antebellum United States was an important and generously shared resource. For good advice about how to frame our work, we are also especially grateful to Rana Hogarth, PhD, Ayah Nuriddin, PhD, and Naomi Rogers, PhD.
We profited along the way from the advice of Hope McGrath, PhD, Assistant Editor at the Yale and Slavery Research Project and Research Coordinator for Yale, New Haven, and Connecticut History at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library; Michelle Zacks, PhD, Associate Director of Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition; and Jessie Cohen, Repatriation Registrar at Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History. Michael Morand, Director of Community Engagement at the Beinecke Library, helpfully answered research questions and posed new ones. Beyond Yale, Daryl Keith Daniels, MD, Ian Read, PhD, Alec Lurie, Roberta B. Schwartz, and John Cross shared important insights and/or provided research support. Dan Sterner of Historic Buildings of Connecticut kindly permitted us to reproduce a photograph; John Mills of Alex Breanne Corporation pointed us to the traffic of prisoner bodies from Wethersfield State Prison to Yale’s medical school; and Jane Zhao and Ian Mellor-Crummey of Rice University’s Digital Media Commons facilitated some of the voice-over recordings for “Taken in New Haven.”
Guidance on how best to share some of our research findings came from the good counsel of Yale School of Medicine’s Office of Communications staff, including Mary Hu, Jennifer Hill, Kimberly Conner, Jasree Peralta, and especially Lena Smith Parker. For video production, we are indebted to Mark Albis, Noah Golden, Lindsey Leger, and Andrew Osborne.
We have leaned heavily on the knowledge and guidance of the archivists and librarians who have charge of Yale collections, including William Landis, Michael Lotstein, and Michael Morand at the Beinecke Library, and Christopher Zollo at the Medical Historical Library. Our greatest research debt is to the incomparable Melissa Grafe, PhD, John R. Bumstead Librarian for Medical History at Yale’s Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library. Her knowledge of Yale’s archival resources has been indispensable to this project, and her extraordinary generosity, ingenuity, and historical sensibility have fundamentally shaped our work. She also shouldered the task of building this website with additional assistance from Dana Haugh, Web Services Librarian at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library.
We are also hugely grateful to Kathleen Keenan and Patricia Brunetto in the History of Medicine departmental office at Yale School of Medicine who sustained our work and our spirits throughout this project.
This project on Yale School of Medicine was completed before David W. Blight with the Yale and Slavery Research Project’s Yale and Slavery: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024) became available. That book provides excellent insight into the relationship of slavery to the rest of Yale University and New Haven communities. With generous help from Hope McGrath we have made a few late additions that draw on that work.
We are acutely aware of the limitations on what it is possible to accomplish in a short, one-year pilot project. Our charge was to pose questions about the history of Yale School of Medicine that by and large had not been asked or investigated before, and it was at times painful not to be able to follow up on new leads that appeared in the course of our research. We have included citations to our sources in the hope that they will help future researchers explore not only the relationship between Yale School of Medicine and slavery but also its myriad afterlives in the medical world we live with today.
Liana DeMarco, PhD
Sean Morey Smith, PhD
John Harley Warner, PhD
Project staff biographies:
Liana DeMarco received her doctoral degree in 2022 from the Program in the History of Science and Medicine at Yale University. In 2023-2025, she is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in African American Studies at Wesleyan University where she is teaching medical history and working on her first book, Sick Time: Medicine and Management under Slavery. Her writing can be found in the Journal of Southern History, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Slavery & Abolition, and Enterprise & Society.
Sean Morey Smith earned his PhD in History at Rice University in 2020. He is currently completing a book manuscript, entitled The Climate of Race in Abolition, c. 1730-1860, examining how racialized medical ideas of health and climate were used to alternatively support and attack slavery in the Anglophone Atlantic. Currently a Data Services Specialist at the Fondren Library, Rice University, he has published research in such journals as Slavery & Abolition, Medical History, and Urban History as well as in the edited collection Atlantic Environments and the American South. He is also the editor, along with Christopher D. E. Willoughby, of Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery (LSU Press, 2021).
John Harley Warner is Avalon Professor of the History of Medicine at Yale School of Medicine and Professor of History at Yale, where he is also in the Program in the History of Science and Medicine and in American Studies. His explorations of the history of U.S. medical education include The Therapeutic Perspective: Medical Knowledge, Practice, and Identity, 1820-1885 (Harvard, 1986), Against the Spirit of System: The French Impulse in Nineteenth-Century American Medicine (Princeton, 1998), Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine (Blast Books, 2009), and his book in progress with the working title The Mystique of Humanism: Loss, Longing, and Authenticity in the Grounding of Modern Medicine.