Disease, formativity, and the early science of heredity: Medical students debating race, 1785-1840

Kevin’s project explores public dissertations about race presented by Edinburgh medical students in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Two student organizations, the Royal Medical Society and the Royal Physical Society, held monthly salon-style meetings at which students, some of them classmates of a young Charles Darwin, tried their hands at Enlightenment-style debate. One of the most common topics they tackled was the causes of so-called ‘human variety.’ Their training in medicine ensured that discussions of disease figured prominently in their explanations of why people around the globe seemed to differ. Kevin’s project thus seeks to chart how eighteenth-century medical theories about disease contributed to early scientific formulations of race.