drapetomania

thumb|upright|Samuel A. Cartwright (1793–1863) Drapetomania was a proposed mental illness that, in 1851, American physician Samuel A. Cartwright hypothesized as the cause of enslaved Americans fleeing captivity. This hypothesis was based on the belief that slavery was such an improvement upon the lives of slaves that only those suffering from some form of mental illness would wish to escape.

Cartwright specifically cited the tendency of slaves to flee the plantations that held them. Since slaves happy with their condition would not want to leave, he inferred that such people had to be sick, impervious to the natural order of things. He published an article about black slaves' illnesses and idiosyncrasies in ''De Bow's Review''. Contemporarily reprinted in the South, Cartwright's article was widely mocked and satirized in the northern United States. The concept has since been debunked as pseudoscience and shown to be part of the edifice of scientific racism.