Abstract
This essay followed closely on the heels of its predecessor, moving from the concerns of ‘diseased imagination’ to those of the neuroanatomy of skin when viewed in the context of race. I was bewildered by the connections in Enlightenment scientific thought, especially in the light of its developing anthropology. Besides, presentist concerns in the early 1970s drove me there at a moment when you could still use the word ‘Negro’ in America without being called a racist, yet — paradoxically — it was acutely evident that something was profoundly troubled in our race relations. I found one clue in the writings of the obscure French physician Nicolas Le Cat who had won a prize for his radical beliefs about the consequences for race of nervous mechanistic physiology. Note 1 below provides a brief summary of his work. But Le Cat was also representative of the growing Continental attraction to the concept of a thoroughly ‘nervous body’ and became wholly invested in it. His writings, soon known in cities from Edinburgh to Copenhagen and St Petersburg, extended the already large domain of the nerves.
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Notes
There is no biography. Information, and precious little exists, is scattered: see N. F. Eloy, Dictionnaire historique de la médecine ancienne et moderne 4 vols (Paris, 1778), 1, 565–71, for the only brief sketch. Nothing at all is said about Le Cat in the standard histories of medicine by Arturo Castiglione, Fielding H. Garrison, Sir William Osler, Theodor Puschmann, Henry F. Sigerist, Charles J. Singer, René Taton, and E. A. Underwood. René Taton’s Enseignement et diffusion des sciences en France au xviiic siècle (Paris, 1964), briefly discusses Le Cat’s anatomy courses at the Hôtel-Dieu in Rouen.
Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1967), mentions Le Cat in relation to hypnotism. Le Cat’s private papers survive and are available in the Archives of the City, Rouen, France.
On 31 January 1739, Le Cat was elected a foreign member of the Royal Society, London (Thomas Thomson, The History of the Royal Society (London, 1912), appendix xli). After this time his anatomical works were regularly translated into English and reviewed in English journals. His interactions with Dr James Parsons, F.R.S., are described by John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, 6 vols. (1812), v, 475–6. By 1753 Le Cat, many of whose communications were now published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, was sufficiently well known to be referred to by a columnist in the Gentleman’s Magazine, XXIII (1753), 403 as ‘the ingenious writer … who ought to be universally read’. In 1765 Le Cat won the prize of the Berlin Academy by answering their set of physiological questions on the structure of nerves. Offered by the Academy since 1753 but without a candidate, the prize answers were published as Le Cat’s Dissertation sur l’existence & la nature du fluide des nerfs & son action (Berlin, 1765).
The actual questions and an account of Le Cat’s achievement in answering them are found in A. von Harnack, Geschichte der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin (Berlin, 1901), 1400. Le Cat was congratulated by the acclaimed scientist Haller for his attainment.
This is an important point. What a vast sense of the monumental changes of belief and emphasis, as well as theories of cause and effect, one derives by approaching the problem vertically rather than horizontally, starting, let us say, with Robert Boyle’s analysis in Peter Shaw (ed.), The Works of the Hon. Robert Boyle (1772; ed., 1699), 1, 714–19, ‘Of Colours: Experiment-xi’. A brief reading list after 1780 might include: E. G. Bosé, De Mutato per morbum colore corporis humani (Leipzig, 1785); Robert Know (ethnologist), The Races of Man (1850–62) and Man: His Structure and Physiology (1857); Franz Pruner-Bey, ‘Notions preliminaires sur la coloration de la peau chez l’homme’, Bulletins de la Société d’Anthropologie, V (1864), 65–135;
C. H. G. Pouchet, Des colorations de l’épidemie (Paris, 1864);
L. Dunbar, Ueber Pigmenterungen der Haut (Berlin, 1884);
Ashley Montagu, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: the Fallacy of Race (New York, 1952, 3rd edn rev.);
Richard Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1952);
J. S. Slotkin, ‘Eighteenth Century Social Anthropology’, in Readings in Early Anthropology (1965), 244–356;
John S. Haller, Outcasts from Evolution: Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority, 1859–1900 (Urbana, 1971).
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© 2004 George Rousseau
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Rousseau, G.S. (2004). Nerves and Racism: Le Cat’s Neurology of Racism (1973). In: Nervous Acts. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230505155_4
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