'Constitutions selection': Darwin, race and medicine. (2021)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Seth, Suman
• Editors: Milam, Erika Lorraine; Seth, Suman
• Is Part Of: BJHS Themes. Volume 6(2021)
• Page Start: 25
• Page End: 43
• Publication Date: 2021
• Subjects: Science -- Historiography -- Periodicals; Science -- History -- Periodicals; Periodicals; 507.22
• DOI: 10.1017/bjt.2021.1
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2058-850X

Abstract

Abstract: In the course of his discussion of the origin of variations in skin colour among humans in the Descent of Man, Charles Darwin suggested that darker skin might be correlated with immunity to certain diseases. To make that suggestion, he drew upon a claim that seemed self-evidently correct in 1871, although it had seemed almost certainly incorrect in the late eighteenth century: that immunity to disease could be understood as a hereditary racial trait. This paper aims to show how fundamental was the idea of 'constitutions selection', as Darwin would call it, for his thinking about human races, tracking his (ultimately unsuccessful) attempts to find proof of its operation over a period of more than thirty years. At the same time and more broadly, following Darwin's conceptual resources on this question helps explicate relationships between conceptions of disease and conceptions of race in the nineteenth century. That period saw the birth of a modern, fixist, biologically determinist racism, which increasingly manifested itself in medical writings. The reverse was also true: medicine was a crucial site in which race was forged. The history of what has been called 'race-science', it is argued, cannot and should not be written independent of the history of 'race-medicine'.