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Abstract
[Samuel Cartwright]'s new disease, Drapetomania, was derived from two Greek words, one meaning "a runaway slave", the other signifying "mad or crazy". This mental disorder of slaves had one defining characteristic: the sufferer had an unconscionable desire to abscond from his or her owner. "Wanting to run away from slavery doesn't strike me as crazy", I can hear you say. For Cartwright, this reaction would have carried no weight. For him, slavery was the "natural" state of the Africans who had been transported to North America in droves. Blacks were, he argued, the descendants of Canaan, a Hebrew word he translated as "the submissive knee-bender". Slavery was ordained both by the Bible and the brute facts of "nature". The psychology and physiology of Blacks left them fit only for servitude. They were like children, who worshipped authority and were happy only when a benevolent master looked after them and gave them regular tasks to perform.