Yale School of Medicine and Slavery

The Care of Black Patients

Examining cases when Yale medical faculty members treated Black patients reveals that they, like many white physicians in the antebellum United States, believed Black people were of a race distinct from other peoples. Jonathan Knight (1789-1864), who was professor of anatomy and physiology from 1813-1838 and professor of surgery from 1838-1864, saw many Black patients in his New Haven-based medical practice. Thomas Hubbard (1774-1838), who was professor of surgery from 1829-1838, discussed Black patients in his lectures. Charles Hooker (1799-1863), who was professor of anatomy and physiology from 1838-1863 and the first Dean of Yale’s medical school, attended the Africans of the famous slave ship the La Amistad while they were imprisoned in New Haven.

Taken together, these cases shed light on the kind of racist assumptions that Yale faculty members harbored about Black people. Such harmful assumptions include the idea that Black people are difficult patients who are incapable of knowing their own bodies, and the notion that Black people often consume medicines unnecessarily, both of which reflect the long-standing idea that Black patients do not feel pain to the same extent that other patients do. By repeating these tropes in their lectures and writings, Yale faculty contributed to their persistence.

Figure 1. Portrait of Jonathan Knight by Nathaniel Jocelyn (1828). Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, Yale School of Medicine. Until very recently, this portrait hung in the Cushing Rotunda of Yale School of Medicine.

Jonathan Knight (Figure 1) wore many hats in the medical community of antebellum New Haven. He was born in Norwalk, Connecticut in 1789 and graduated from Yale College in 1808. In 1812-1813, he attended medical lectures at the College of Philadelphia (which would become the University of Pennsylvania), and in 1818 he received an honorary medical degree from Yale, although by that point he had already been teaching at the school for five years. In addition to serving in two different faculty roles at the Medical Institution of Yale College (professor of anatomy and physiology from 1813-1838 and professor of surgery from 1838-1864), he was also the school’s treasurer from 1812-1839. 

Knight was a member of the New Haven Medical Society, the Connecticut Medical Society, and the General Hospital Society of Connecticut, the latter of which in 1826 founded the New Haven Hospital, which would become Yale’s primary teaching hospital. Knight also took on national medical leadership roles, serving as President of the convention that formed the American Medical Association in 1846-1847, and then as President of the Association itself in 1853. [1] Between 1813 and 1841, Knight ran a private medical practice in New Haven. Unlike fellow founding faculty member Benjamin Silliman, Knight did not come from money, so his medical practice was probably an important source of income that allowed him to take on so many other roles that conferred prestige, but little or no pay.

In his practice, Knight saw dozens of Black patients in New Haven and surrounding towns, including East Haven, Branford, Hamden, Wallingford, and Wolcott. He recorded all of these cases in his daybook (which was a type of accounting book in which daily transactions were recorded as they occurred), although the amount of information Knight provided for each case varied considerably. Sometimes he wrote down the Black patient’s name (often just their first name), how often and where he saw the patient, the reasons for his visit, and his fee. For example, on June 12, 1813 Knight saw a patient in New Haven whom he called “Francis (negro),” charging this man a total of $3.37 for two home visits and a prescription for “diaph[oretic] powders.” [2] Sometimes, Knight only noted the patient’s race, where he saw them, and how much he charged. For example, on August 15, 1814, Knight saw a “black woman” at the home of one “Mrs. M. Lyons.” Mrs. Lyons appears to have been the person who paid Knight’s fee of 25 cents in “cash” [3] (Figure 2).

Page from Jonathan Knight's daybook showing an entry for a "black woman" patient.

Figure 2. Page from Knight's daybook showing an entry (the last entry on this page) for a "black woman" patient, whom Knight saw at the home of "Mrs. M. Lyons." It appears that Mrs. Lyons paid 25 cents for Knight's visit. Knight’s daybook, vol. 1, p. 18, box 4. Jonathan Knight Account Books and Day Books (GEN MSS 1855). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

The lack of detail in this entry means that we cannot fully determine who “Mrs. M. Lyons” was and what kind of relationship she had with the “black woman” in question. It is possible that the woman worked for Mrs. Lyons, who paid Knight’s fee on her employee’s behalf, perhaps with the expectation that the money would be paid back at some point. However, it is also possible that this woman was enslaved to Mrs. Lyons, as enslavers often paid for the medical care of enslaved people. Connecticut had passed a law of gradual abolition in 1784, which stipulated that those people born into slavery after March 1, 1784 would be emancipated by the time that they turned twenty-five. Therefore, there were still enslaved people in New Haven in 1814. [4]

This ambiguity with regard to the legal status of Black patients and their relationship to the white people who may have paid for their care can also be seen in Knight’s many visits to “negroes” at the “W[illia]m Pinto [House]” in New Haven (Figure 3).

Page from Jonathan Knight's daybook showing an entry for a “negro” patient

Figure 3. One example of an entry for a “negro” patient whom Knight saw “at Wm. Pinto” on May 21, 1819, charging either the patient or Pinto for “di[agnosis]” and “advice” (NB: entry is in the middle of the page). See Knight’s Day Book, vol. 1, p. 87, box 4. Jonathan Knight Account Books and Day Books (GEN MSS 1855). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Figure 4. The William Pinto House in 2020 at its original location of 275 Orange Street in New Haven. Source: Thomas Breen and Allan Appel, “State Signs Off on Historic House Move,” New Haven Independent (August 21, 2020), accessed April 12, 2023.

Between May 21 and August 30, 1819, Knight saw at least thirty patients “at W. Pinto” whom he identified as “black men,” “negroes,” or “negro men.” Most of these entries contained very little information beyond the patient’s race, the cost of the service, and the location where Knight saw them. Originally built in 1810 for a prominent New Haven merchant named John Cook, the William Pinto House (Figure 4) was sold to another prominent merchant named William Pinto in 1812. In 1819, Pinto rented the house to Eli Whitney, famed inventor of the cotton gin, who occupied it until his death in 1825. [5]

Pinto had earned his bachelor’s degree from Yale in 1777 and then during the Revolutionary War he served in the Connecticut militia. After the war, he moved to the British island of Trinidad to teach school, but eventually left teaching to set up a shipping business between Trinidad and New Haven. From the 1790s through the 1840s, Pinto’s ships brought lumber from Connecticut to the West Indies and returned with slave-produced commodities such as sugar, rum, coffee, and tobacco. Pinto spent most of this time in New Haven and New York City, but died in New Orleans in 1847. [6]

It is possible that some of the Black patients Knight saw at the William Pinto House were enslaved or formerly enslaved people, and the 1810 census shows that there were six enslaved people in William Pinto’s household. The 1820 census does not list any enslaved people, but it does show two free people of color: a man between the ages of 26-45 and a woman between the ages of 26-45. [7] Furthermore, according to one New Haven historian, Pinto brought at least one enslaved person to New Haven from the West Indies: a mixed-race man named “Quash Piere,” who eventually became one of New Haven’s Black “governors.” [8] Knight’s daybook does not indicate if any of the people he saw at William Pinto’s House were enslaved or of West Indian extraction.

What is clear, however, is that Knight believed it was critical to make note of their Blackness in his case records. Knight noted the patient’s race when he saw Black patients, but it does not appear that he was in the habit of recording race in any other patient cases. This suggests that Knight believed not just race, but Blackness (meaning what he perceived to be the physical, mental, and moral characteristics of people with African ancestry) impacted how he would understand a patient’s condition, and ultimately, how he would treat them. [9]

Figure 5. Portrait of Thomas Hubbard (artist and date unknown). Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, Yale School of Medicine.

Yale professor of surgery Thomas Hubbard (Figure 5) also believed that race, if not Blackness specifically, was medically significant. Born in Smithfield, Rhode Island in 1774, Hubbard learned medicine from a former Revolutionary War surgeon and in 1795 settled in Pomfret, Connecticut, where he established a medical practice. Even after taking the appointment as professor of surgery in 1829, Hubbard continued to practice medicine intermittently in the Pomfret area, which is over 60 miles from New Haven. Apparently, he took some of his students with him on medical calls. Pomfret residents told stories of the “fast riding” Hubbard and his pupils, whom they called “his hounds.” [10]

Hubbard often drew on his medical practice to craft his surgery lectures, and it is also clear that his practice informed his ideas on racial differences. Like Knight, Hubbard took care to mention what he perceived as their race and/or their geographical origin, unless the patient appeared to be white. He was especially attentive to race when it came to Black patients, as was evident in one surgery lecture wherein Hubbard recounted a case of frostbite. He described how “in the winter of 1829-30. A coloured man froze his feet. … for a considerable distance up his legs.” Hubbard explained that he told the patient “his feet were dead, or mortified,” but apparently, “he [the Black patient] did not believe me as he could walk a little with assistance.” [11] Hubbard ended his discussion of this case by stating: “I suggested [to] him that he had better have them [the man’s feet] amputated.” [12]

Figure 6. Portrait of Charles Hooker by Ulysses Dow Tenney (n.d.). Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, Yale School of Medicine.

One lengthy account of Charles Hooker’s encounter with the Africans of La Amistad recorded by a Yale medical student acting as his apprentice offers another example of interactions with enslaved patients.  Charles Hooker (Figure 6) was born in Berlin, Connecticut in 1799. He was a descendant of Thomas Hooker, the English colonial leader and Congregationalist minister who founded the Connecticut Colony and is often referred to as “Father of Connecticut.” Charles graduated in 1820 from Yale College and received his medical degree from Yale in 1823. He practiced medicine in the New Haven area for the next forty years. In 1838, he was appointed professor of anatomy and physiology at Yale, a position he held until his death in 1863. [13] In 1845, Hooker was elected first Dean of the Medical Institution of Yale College, the first appointment of a dean at any of Yale’s graduate schools. [14]

Several years before he received this honor, Hooker gained some notoriety for attending the Africans of La Amistad.

Figure 7. “Cinque The Chief of the Amistad Captives,” painted by Nathaniel Jocelyn; engraved by J. Sartain (Philadelphia: 1840). Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

On June 28, 1839, two Spanish-Cuban plantation owners, Don José Ruiz and Don Pedro Montes, bought fifty-three African enslaved people from the slave market in Havana, Cuba and forced them aboard the Spanish schooner La Amistad. The ship was headed for another port in eastern Cuba, near where Ruiz and Montes owned plantations, but it never arrived. On July 2, a group of enslaved people, led by a Mende man named Sengbe Pieh (also known as Joseph Cinqué), revolted (Figure 7). They killed the ship’s captain and cook, and then demanded that Ruiz and Montes sail them back to Africa (Figure 8). Ruiz and Montes instead sailed north, up the eastern coast of the United States, with the hope that the ship would be intercepted and sent back to Cuba. On August 24, 1839, the U.S. ship Washington seized La Amistad off Montauk Point on Long Island, New York. On August 31, 1839, the insurrectionists were incarcerated in New Haven on charges of murder and piracy. La Amistad was towed to nearby New London and the African people remaining on the ship were arrested and sent to the New Haven jail. [15]

Illustration of La Amistad insurrection

Figure 8. Illustration of La Amistad insurrection in John W. Barber, A History of the Amistad Captives: Being a Circumstantial Account of the Capture of the Spanish Schooner Amistad, by the Africans on Board (New Haven, CT: E.L. & J.W. Barber. Hitchcock & Stafford, 1840).

The Africans of La Amistad had been imprisoned for nearly three months when, on November 19, 1839, Yale professor of anatomy Charles Hooker went to the New Haven jail to visit them. The account we have of this visit comes from one of Hooker’s medical students, Edmund Randolph Peaslee, who accompanied Hooker to the jail and wrote about his experience in a letter to his friend, Amassa Kinne (Figure 9). Peaslee and Kinne had been roommates during their undergraduate years at Dartmouth in Hanover, New Hampshire. At the time of Peaslee’s writing, Kinne was attending medical school at Dartmouth.

Letter from Edmund Randolph Peaslee to Amassa Kinne, New Haven, November 21, 1839

Figure 9. Page 2 of Peaslee’s letter, second paragraph, begins his description of the encounter with La Amistad Africans. Letter from Edmund Randolph Peaslee to Amassa Kinne, New Haven, November 21, 1839. Box 3, folder M-Sh, Miscellaneous Letters Collection (Ms Coll 49), Medical Historical Library, Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, Yale School of Medicine.

“Dr. Hooker attends the Africans of the Amistad, about whom so much has been said by the Abolitionists & others,” Peaslee wrote. “I called with him to see the sick ones, night before last; 4 had chronic diarrhea, of which they are nearly well; another had a pretty severe pleuritis [a condition of the lungs].” Peaslee also insisted that “they are all as happy as clams, in spite of all Abolition assertions.” [16] Even though he acknowledged that some of the Africans were sick, and he, along with everyone else in New Haven, knew of the ordeal they had been through since late June, Peaslee felt it necessary to tell his friend that abolitionist claims regarding squalor and sickness in the jail were vastly overstated. [17] Moreover, his insistence that Africans were “happy as clams” used a classic trope of slavery apologia that portrayed Black people as being content with crude living conditions due to their supposedly inferior intellects. [18]

While writing his letter to Kinne, Peaslee was interrupted by “an hour or more to attend the lecture on Practice,” but after dealing with his medical school course work, he resumed his discussion of the visit to the jail. “I meant to tell you how fond those Africans are of Medicine,” Peaslee continued. “No matter whether the dose be antimony, Glauber salts, or squill, they gulp it down most greedily. Hooker is obliged to have his bowl of prepared chalk for diarrhea in an adjoining room, else they would soon use it all up.” [19] Here, Peaslee seems to be implying that Africans from La Amistad were overly eager to consume medicines, taking them “greedily” and at a frequency which Peaslee deemed wholly unnecessary. These people were probably severely malnourished after surviving for months on a ship that was only provisioned for a week-long voyage, and then living in jail cells for another three months. This may have led them to “gulp” down anything they could get their hands on (if we are to trust Peaslee that this happened in the first place).

However, Peaslee’s description of their supposedly eager and unnecessary consumption of medicines seems eerily similar to certain features of anti-Black racism that still exist in medicine. The false idea that Black people feel less pain compared to other patients has been a persistent feature of American medicine since slavery. Many historians of race and medicine have argued that this medical myth has contributed to the undertreatment of Black suffering as well as higher rates of Black morbidity and mortality. As one historian of medicine found, white physicians have been quick to label Black patients with sickle-cell anemia as “drug-seekers” when they tell physicians they are experiencing pain associated with the disease. [20]

Figure 10. “The Negro in His Own Country” vs. “The Negro in America,” an example of pro-slavery propaganda intended to show the “savagery” of life in Africa and the “civilizing” effects of life in the United States. In Josiah Priest, Bible Defense of Slavery (Glasgow, KY: W. S. Brown, 1853).

Peaslee went on to say that the imprisoned Africans were impressed with what they had seen of the United States thus far and had no desire to return to Africa. “They say in their broken English that they’ll not again return to Africa. ‘No Africa,’ ‘no shoe,’ ‘no beef,’ they say, when you speak to them of their native country. On the contrary when asked if they will stay here, they say ‘America, yes, yes’ ‘shoe America’ ‘America beef, &c &c.’” [21] Peaslee was wrong in his claim that the prisoners had no desire to return to Africa. The first demand the insurrectionists made after seizing La Amistad was for Ruiz and Montes to sail back to Africa. Moreover, Peaslee’s insinuation that the Africans preferred the material comforts they had supposedly seen in the United States played into a different, yet equally racist, trope of slavery apologia, which held that Black people preferred to live in the refined, “civilized” United States as opposed to living lives of “savagery” in Africa (Figure 10).

The next night, Peaslee and Hooker returned to the jail. As Peaslee noted:

We called about 8 in the evening…The five sick ones were in a separate room. The well ones (about 30) were in two other rooms – most of them asleep, two in each bunk on a straw bed, some few (however with all their clothes off close to a stove hot as an oven, for it is difficult to keep their clothes upon them) and one old fellow perched upon his bedrail smoking, and happy as a clam. All these circumstances gave a very ludicrous appearance to the group.[22]

Even from Peaslee’s description, it is clear that the prisoners’ accommodations were deplorable: thirty people in one room, sleeping two to a bunk, and with one stove to heat the rooms. The prisoners were likely still wearing the same clothes they had on their backs when they left Havana, which would not have been remotely suitable for late fall in New England. Yet, Peaslee attributed their “ludicrous appearance” to their character, more than anything else.

Nothing in Peaslee’s letter tells us why his mentor Charles Hooker attended La Amistad Africans. The Amistad rebellion had become a national news story. Journalists, abolitionists, and lawyers from all over the region came to visit the prisoners while they were jailed in New Haven awaiting trial. Perhaps Hooker was simply curious to see the Africans, or he was sympathetic to their plight and believed he could help them by providing medical care. Peaslee did not mention that anyone paid for Hooker’s services, so it is possible that they were free, perhaps to gain firsthand knowledge of their bodies and illnesses, which he assumed were different from those of local patients. Medical professors in this period often made their careers on reporting new medical observations in journals.

According to one account of the Amistad rebellion and its aftermath, six of the prisoners died between September 1839 and May 1840, during which time the group was jailed in New Haven. They included “Fa[quorna]” who died September 3, 1839; “Tua,” who died September 11; “We-lu-wa,” who died September 14; “Ka-pe-li,” who died October 30; “Yam-mo-ni,” who died November 4; and “Ka-ba,” who died December 31. [23] La Amistad Africans were jailed in New Haven for a total of nineteen months, throughout the duration of their Federal District court case in Connecticut and the appeal to the United States Supreme Court, which finally concluded in favor of their freedom in March, 1841. The surviving Africans – by then numbering only thirty-five people – returned to West Africa in late November, 1841. [24]

Endnotes

1. Obituary Record of Yale College Graduates, series 6, no. 24 (New Haven, CT: Yale College, 1865), 163-164.
    
2. See Knight’s daybook, volume 1 (1813-1819), box 4, Jonathan Knight Account Books and Day Books (GEN MSS 1855), Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
    
3.  Knight’s daybook, volume  1, box 4, Jonathan Knight Account Books and Day Books.
    
4.  David Menschel, “Abolition without Deliverance: The Law of Connecticut Slavery 1784-1848,” Yale Law Journal Vol. 111, no. 1 (Oct. 2001): 183-222.
    
5. Eldon Scott, J. Paul Loether, and John Herzan, "National Register of Historic Places Inventory-Nomination: William Pinto House / William Pinto-Eli Whitney House," (February 19, 1985). National Park Service, https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/GetAsset/NRHP/85002316_text, accessed April 12, 2023.
    
6. Biographical details for Pinto can be found in William Lewis Philie, Change and Tradition in New Haven, Connecticut, 1780-1830 (Westport, CT: Garland Publishing, 1989), pp. 64-65; Chapter Sketches: Connecticut Daughters of the American Revolution, ed. Mary Philotheta Root (New Haven, CT: Connecticut Daughters of the American Revolution, 1904), 181.
    
7. United States Census Office, Aggregate Amount of Each Description of Persons within the United States of America, and the Territories thereof, Agreeably to Actual Enumeration Made According to Law, in the Year 1810 (Washington: 1811); United States Census Office, Census for 1820. Published by Authority of an Act of Congress, under the Direction of the Secretary of State (Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1821).
    
8. Orville Hitchcock Platt, “Negro Governors,” Papers of the New Haven Colony Historical Society, Vol. 6 (New Haven, CT: Tuttle, Morehouse, and Taylor Co. Printers, 1900): 315-335. For mention of Quash Piere, whom Platt described as “a mulatto from the West Indies . . .  brought to New Haven by Captain William Pinto,” see 333. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Black communities in Connecticut elected a member of their community to serve as governor or “king.” This man would perform important functions within the community, overseeing judicial and religious ceremonies while often upholding law and order amongst Black inhabitants and acting as a mediator between Black and white communities. Many of these governors were enslaved or formerly enslaved people. See “Connecticut’s Black Governors,” Museum of Connecticut History, https://museumofcthistory.org/connecticuts-black-governors/, accessed April 12, 2023.
    
9. For more on white physicians’ ideas of Blackness during this period and how those ideas related to medical treatment of Black people see Rana Hogarth, Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).
    
10. Yale University, Memorial of the Centennial of the Yale Medical School (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1915), 17.
     
11. Several historians of medicine and slavery have shown how white writers often portrayed Black patients as “ignorant” and/or “superstitious” of medicine when they did not appear to comply with the will of white physicians. See for example Deirdre Cooper Owens, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2017), 32; and Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (New York, NY: Doubleday, 2007), 49.
     
12. Thomas Hubbard surgery lecture notes (vol. 2), 1829, box 56, folder 304, Yale Course Lectures Collection (RU 159), Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.  Accessed July 30, 2022, https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/12/resources/2777. For quotation see 89.
     
13.  Obituary Record of Yale College Graduates, series 4, no. 26 (New Haven, CT: Yale College, 1863): 92-3.
     
14. Kerry L. Falvey, Medicine at Yale: The First 200 Years (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 43.
     
15. For an account of the Amistad rebellion, the imprisonment of the Africans, and the subsequent U.S. Circuit Court trail and Supreme Court trial, which eventually ruled in favor of their freedom, see Marcus Rediker, The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom (New York, NY: Viking, 2012).
     
16. Letter from Edmund Randolph Peaslee to Amassa Kinne, New Haven, 21 November 1839 in box 3, folder M-Sh, Miscellaneous Letters Collection (Ms Coll 49), Medical Historical Library, Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, Yale University School of Medicine.
     
17. Many ordinary citizens and journalists visited the Amistad Africans in the New Haven jail and published their findings in business newspapers, such as the New York Journal of Commerce, and abolitionist newspapers such as The Emancipator and the Pennsylvania Freeman. See Rediker, Amistad Rebellion, 11.
     
18. White doctors were some of the most prominent purveyors of this myth, often arguing that it justified keeping Black people in slavery. See for example New York physician John H. Van Evrie’s Negroes and “Negro Slavery”: The First an Inferior Race: The Latter Its Normal Condition (New York, NY: Van Evrie, Horton, & Co., 1861).
     
19. Peaslee to Kinne, November 21, 1839.
     
20. Keith Wailoo, Pain: A Political History (Baltimore, MD: the Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 194.
     
21. Peaslee to Kinne, 21 November, 1839.
     
22. Peaslee to Kinne, 21 November, 1839.
     
23. See John Warner Barber, A History of the Amistad Captives: Being a Circumstantial Account of the Capture of the Spanish Schooner Amistad, by the Africans on Board (New Haven, CT: E.L. & J.W. Barber. Hitchcock & Stafford, 1840), 15; Rediker notes that the full first name of the first person to die in New Haven was “Faquorna”(Rediker, Amistad Rebellion, 112).
     
24. For more on the trials and the return to West Africa see Rediker, The Amistad Rebellion.