Josiah C. Nott
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Josiah Clark Nott (31 March 1804– 31 March 1873) was an American physician and surgeon; he was a writer on surgery, yellow fever, and a proponent of scientific racist theories.
He was born in South Carolina, son of the Federalist politician and judge Abraham Nott, and resided from 1833 in Mobile, Alabama.
He took up theories that the mosquito was a vector for malaria, held by John Crawford and his contemporary Lewis Daniel Beauperthy, and applied them to yellow fever, then a serious health problem of the American South. In his 1850 Yellow Fever Contrasted with Bilious Fever he attacked the prevailing miasma theory.
His racial theories were put forth in a book of essays, from 1854, written with George Robins Gliddon, an Egyptologist and follower of Samuel George Morton. Entitled Types of Mankind or Ethnological Research, it successfully popularized the polygenist theory, of separate origins of races of humans. Its arguments (racist and creationist) were addressed by Charles Darwin in his 1871 The Descent of Man.
In 1856, with Henry Hotz, he was responsible for a translation from the French of Arthur Gobineau's 1853 essay on racial inequality. This work of Holz and Nott has been criticised for distortion:
- By 1856, Josiah Nott of Mobile, Alabama, prepared an English version with the help of Henry Hotz. The result was a seriously doctored text. Nott added an Appendix of his own, and Hotz supplied numerous notes. […] Nott and Hotz omitted the laws of repulsion and attraction, which were at the heart of Gobineau's account of the role of race-mixing in the rise and fall of civilizations.[1]
[edit] Works
- Two lectures on the connection between the Biblical and physical history of man. Delivered by invitation from the Chair of political economy, etc., of the Louisiana university, in December 1848. (1849)
- An essay on the natural history of mankind, viewed in connection with Negro slavery delivered before the Southern Rights Association, 14th December, 1850 (1851)
- Types of Mankind: Or, Ethnological Researches, Based Upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania of Races, and Upon Their Natural, Geographical, Philological, and Biblical History: Illustrated by Selections from the inedited Papers of Samuel George Morton, M. D and by additional contributions from Prof. L.Agassiz, LLD; W. Usher, M.D.; Prof. H.S. Patterson, M.D. (1854)
