Samuel Adolphus Cartwright is a racist doctor born on November 3, 1793 in Virginia.

He worked in the slave States of Mississippi and Louisiana.

Having convinced himself, following a trip to Europe, that there was a plot against the American prosperity which, he believed, was based on cotton cultivation and slavery, he began to publish.

During the American Civil War, he joined the Confederates.

He is mainly known for having invented two so-called mental illnesses, peculiar, in his opinion, to African-Americans and especially to slaves: Draperomania, from the Greek drapes, flight, and mania, madness, which would explain the envy that slaves have to take flight. And dysaesthesia aethiopica (an African sensibility disorder) that would reflect the fact that they do not want to work.

According to Cartwright, the symptoms were daze and insensibility of the epidermis.

Whipping, of course, was one of the best therapies recommended by the doctor.

Samuel A. Cartwright died on May 2, 1863 in Jackson, Mississippi. His racist and pseudoscientific theses gave rise to many taunts, especially from Northerners.