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Social History of Medicine 1997 10(2):263-289; doi:10.1093/shm/10.2.263
© 1997 by Society for the Social History of Medicine
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An ‘Anthropathology’ of the ‘American Negro’: Anthropology, Genetics, and the New Racial Science, 1940–1952

MELBOURNE TAPPER*

*Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin Texas, USA

SUMMARY This essay documents how, in the 1940s and early 1950s, one scientifically discredited racialist assumption, namely the notion that ‘hybridity’, embodied by the ‘American Negro’, and linked to degeneration and disease, was re-authorized, again by science, through the discursive fusion of anthropology, medicine and genetics in the context of a particular disease—sickle cell anaemia. More specifically, I am concerned with the construction of what came to be called an ‘anthropathology’ of the ‘American Negro’, the discourse networks that situated it, its conditions of possibility and its consequences.

Keywords: ‘anthropology’; anthropathology medicine; genetics; eugenics; racial science; sickle cell anaemia; ‘American Negro’; hybridity; discourse analysis; twentieth century


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