C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists
Fourth Biennial Conference
Penn State University, March 17-20, 2016

Panel 79. Racial Diagnosis: Disease, Regulation, Remedy
Chair: Julia Rosenbloom, The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
Don James McLaughlin, University of Pennsylvania, “Diagnosing
Dread: Rabies, Phobia, and Blackness in Frederick Douglass
and Harriet Beecher Stowe”
Robert Gunn, University of Texas at El Paso, “American Horologics:
Josiah Gregg’s Clockwork Minstrelsy and the Commerce of
Empire”
Geoffrey Sanborn, Amherst College, “Masculinity, AntiColonizationism, and William Wells Brown”
Sören Fröhlich, Independent Scholar, “Doctor Who? Unsettling
William Wells Brown, M.D.”

Abstract:
In this paper I ask how William Wells Brown’s medical practice and his life relate, and how they further our understanding of both his therapeutic choices and literature. Brown is often lauded as the first black novelist for his brilliant 1853 novel Clotel; or The President’s Daughter, and less frequently for his narratives explaining his escape from enslavement, his struggles to free his family members, his travels through Europe, his help to other escaping slaves, his activism in the temperance movement, and his contributions to black historiography. He wrote about medicine in several texts, but most salient here is the contrast between what I want to shorthand as “old medicine” in Clotel and My Southern Home, and “new medicine” in a biographical note to The Rising Son and Brown’s more detailed biography recently made available to us by Ezra Greenspan. Brown’s emphasis on the political potential of medical therapies helps us both distinguish and bridge his early and late writings and the ways he implemented his thought in his practice. Among all of Brown’s many accomplishments, his medical profession is frequently neglected, but to me it is exactly this aspect of his later life and work that we should start with. Stressing the doctor in Dr. Brown as a doctor shows me that his abolitionist and anti-racist thought also influenced the material dimension of medicine and in turn helps us distinguish the subtle strands of his textual fabrics.