Mad with Freedom: The Political Economy of Blackness, Insanity, and Civil Rights in the U.S. South, 1840–1940 by Élodie Edwards-Grossi (review)

Reviewed by: Mad with Freedom: The Political Economy of Blackness, Insanity, and Civil Rights in the U. S. South, 1840–1940 by Élodie Edwards-Grossi Dea Boster (bio) Mad with Freedom: The Political Economy of Blackness, Insanity, and Civil Rights in the U. S. South, 1840–1940. By Élodie Edwards-Grossi. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022. Pp. 246. Cloth, 45. 00. ) The goal of Élodie Edwards-Grossi's Mad with Freedom is to produce a "social history of psychiatric theories and practices targeting black patients, from the end of slavery to the early twentieth century, in order to shed light End Page 281 on the systemic medicalization and psychiatrization of the black body in American society" (3). The book places medical professionals and institutions squarely within the "political economy" of the American South, a very useful reminder that scientific meanings and systems did not develop in isolation from broader social and political trends; in some cases, political and medical decisions were made by the exact same individuals. The author situates this work at the intersection of several fields of study (medicine, science, Black studies, the American South, and sociology), but, in essence, the book reads as an epistemological investigation, shedding light on the production of racial and disease classifications and assumptions that influenced medical knowledge, political decisions, and institutional operations for nearly a century. In Edwards-Grossi's words, "The development of racial medicine and theories on black behavior between 1840 and 1940 not only produced biodeterminist concepts of race but also informed notions of citizenship and civil rights, as psychiatry metamorphosed into a truly political science" (7). A number of recent scholars—including Jim Downs, Rana Hogarth, Mical Raz, and Wendy Gonaver—have published impressive studies that address older gaps in scholarship related to intersections of racism, disease, and institutionalization in U. S. history. 1 Edwards-Grossi's intervention further widens the chronological and geographic lenses of the topic. Mad with Freedom spans an entire century, moving from the antebellum period to the 1930s, and incorporates evidence from European psychiatrists and theorists as well as medical and political authorities in the U. S. South; the book is both impressively concise and astonishingly rich in scope. The chapters are arranged in roughly chronological order, covering the development of racialized understandings of disease and insanity in the antebellum period, then shifting to focus more on the development of southern segregated asylums in the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras. A through line for this chronology is "the strange career of the 1840 census statistics" (Edwards-Grossi's title for chapter 2), which the author analyzes as a primary inflection point in the pathologization of Blackness. Erroneous reports of disproportionately high levels of "insanity" among free Black Americans fueled paternalistic arguments that people of color were unfit to be free, long after the data were proven to be inaccurate and had been called into question by esteemed Black physician James McCune Smith and Spanish physician Ramón de la Sagra. In many ways, "the census became an institution and a battlefield that pushed physicians and political commentators to shape various political interpretations of insanity, in both the antebellum and postbellum eras" (47). Edwards-Grossi draws a strong, continuous thread of concern about the rise of Black End Page 282 madness during and after the Civil War, which influenced the opening of Black and segregated asylums in the postwar South. These institutions—staffed primarily by white physicians and attendants—devolved into sites of incarceration and forced labor that reified the pathologization of freedom for formerly enslaved people, and they became more crowded and underfunded by the early twentieth century. As the author notes, "The poor living conditions of black patients in southern institutions at the turn of the century highlights the building of a long-lasting unequal medical system, which in turn influenced the installment and reinforcement of a distinct southern political economy built on exploiting and commodifying blackness for the profit of white supremacy" (95). The pathologization of Blackness continued throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as American psychiatrists embraced theories and classifications of madness coming out of Europe. Edwards-Grossi examines the development of "change of life" and. . .