Aesculapius was a white man: antebellum racism and male chauvinism at Harvard Medical School.

T HE DECLARATION that "this is a white man's country" has echoed time and again down the corridors of America's past, and expresses with appalling succinctness the fusion of racial and male chauvinisms and American nationality. Recently, due to the social ferment of our times, scholars have begun to give unprecedented attention to the oppression of American minorities, especially racial minorities and women. Long overdue, these studies have helped to fill very basic gaps in our knowledge of the total American experience. But one of the effects of these studies has been evasionary: they have tended to focus on the minorities rather than those responsible for the plight of the outgroups. While studies by scholars like C. Wright Mills and G. William Domhoff have demonstrated that power in America has been almost exclusively a monopoly of white men, they have neither analyzed the relationships of the oppressions of different outgroups nor explored adequately the motivations of white men in America. While studies by historians like Winthrop Jordan and Eleanor Flexnor have respectively analyzed the subordination of blacks and women, they have been fragmented by the specialization inherent in academic disciplines. Such a fragmented approach has discouraged comparative analysis of the stereotypes applied to blacks and women, and fails to recognize how the oppression of different groups served common needs of white men. Thus a fascinating and disturbing question still remains largely unanswered: Why have white men historically relegated people unlike themselves to specially defined "places"? Possibly a study of the admissions controversy at Harvard Medical School in 1850 can serve as a test to probe the linkages between racial and sexual oppression in American culture. Traditionally Harvard Medical School had been an institution for white men only. But in November 1850, the faculty admitted three black men Martin Delany, Daniel Laing, and Isaac Snowden, and a white woman Harriot K. Hunt.1 Actually the admission was hardly an expression of enlightened views on race and sex. The faculty understood that the black students would emigrate and practice medicine in Africa. Their application for admission probably would have been denied had they wished to remain in America. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Dean of the Harvard Medical School, asked Dr. H. H. Childs of the Pittsfield Medical School for advice on the admission of black, students. In his reply, dated December 12, 1850, Dr. Childs wrote that he was willing to train blacks sponsored by the American Colonization Society. "We For the debate on Martin Delany and whether or not he received a degree from Harvard Medical School, see Theodore Draper, "Martin Delany: The Father of American Black Nationalism," New York Review of Books, March 12, 1970; "An Exchange on Black History," Ibid., May 21, 1970; "Writing Black History," Ibid., July 2, 1970. 128