Penn & Slavery Project

The Man Behind the Art: An Abolitionist’s Role in Crania Americana

Katie Bartlett’s paper investigates the contradictory life of John Collins, an abolitionist printmaker. Despite his abolitionist background, Collins worked with phrenologist Samuel Morton, creating lithographs for Morton’s Crania Americana, one of the most influential works of scientific racism.

The Niell Family at Penn’s Medical School

Penn medical graduates were often part of intergenerational medical families, as in the case of Norcom and his sons, and three generations of the Neill family (Henry, John, and Hollingsworth). The Neills were also transmitters of racist scientific theories.

Why Penn should know who Harriet Jacobs’s tormenter was

Penn medical alum James Norcom was the real life Dr. Flint depicted in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. An alumnus of Penn’s medical school, Norcom continued to enjoy an unblemished professional and political reputation during his lifetime. 

Samuel George Morton’s Influence on Penn’s Medical School Curriculum, 1825-1854 

The racist scientist Samuel George Morton lectured Philadelphia’s medical students for years as he amassed a skull collection of over 900 human crania during his lifetime. Ethan Moses‘ report looks more closely at how Morton’s racist science influenced Penn’s medical curriculum during the mid-nineteenth century.

Southern Medicine at Penn Medical: Mapping the Careers of Three Physician-Enslavers from 1828-1872

Samah Sharmin‘s paper discusses the racial medicine published three southern Penn Medical graduates — Dr. Paul F. Eve, Dr. Daniel W. Brickell, and Dr. William E. Brickell — and probes the racist logic in gynecology and epidemiology that simultaneously upheld distinctions between Black and white bodies while also developing universal surgical techniques on Black bodies.