2026/01/09 by Kevin Siena · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Psychology · #Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices #History of Science and Natural History #Race, Genetics, and Society
paper · doi:10.1093/pastj/gtag001
openalex publication_date 2026/01/09 · openalex created_date 2026/06/26 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/26
Abstract When Enlightenment thinkers debated the so-called ‘Varieties of Man’ they relied to a surprising degree on claims about disease. This article seeks to explain why disease was so useful to eighteenth-century theorists of race. It argues that several major strands of early modern medical thought conceptualized disease as a force that could change the body in lasting and even heritable ways. These include close interaction between conceptions of contagion and early theories of generation, understandings of immunity and susceptibility, as well as the mechanics of hereditary disease. Physicians often presented disease not as a brief episode through which one passed but as a stubborn, durable force that left permanent marks which could linger even over multiple generations. It was this power to change bodies in lasting ways, which I refer to as disease’s ‘formativity’, that gave pathology such utility for Enlightenment-era race-theorists. Enlightenment theorists of human variety needed to explain how physiological differences had developed over time. Disease offered them a force that could account for such evolution. This study seeks to fill in the relationship between medicine as a field with practical application, and medicine as a conceptual apparatus within the pursuit of anthropology.