Over a convivial luncheon on Saturday, six Glasgow University alumni fell to talking about James McCune Smith. You may perhaps be forgiven if you haven’t heard of Dr Smith, because plenty of his contemporaries would have been quite content had his name been expunged from history. The only reason why I have heard of him is that Glasgow University’s new Learning Hub building has been named after him, or as they say in the United States, named for him: the James McCune Smith Learning Hub. Dr Smith was also an alumnus of Glasgow. He was the first African American in the world to earn a medical degree.
He was born into slavery in Manhattan in 1813. (New York abolished slavery in 1827.) He attended the African Free School in Manhattan. He was exceptionally bright. He wanted to study medicine but none of the US medical schools would accept him. So of course, as you do, he came to Glasgow. He graduated in 1837. He worked in Glasgow and Paris, and he published academic papers in London. Then he went home.
Back in Manhattan, he worked as a physician for twenty five years, carried on publishing, but was never admitted to the American Medical Association. His practice was in Lower Manhattan. He opened a pharmacy at 93 West Broadway. He was appointed the only physician to the “Colored Orphan Asylum”. He was active in the abolitionist movement. He encountered much professional opposition due to the colour of his skin, some of it violent, but he countered preconceptions about the supposed intellectual inferiority of African peoples by using the academic skills he had acquired in Scotland, in the emerging academic disciplines of statistics, and statistical analysis. He refuted fallacious argument, using data.
He died of congestive cardiac failure in 1865, shortly before the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution which abolished slavery.
So over lunch we were discussing this remarkable individual who, had he been present on the occasion, would have been one of seven Glas Uni alumni, and one of four statisticians present, one of whom explained, “His mother was a slave…”
“No, you can’t say that,” said I, somewhat mischievously. “You have to say, ‘She was an enslaved person’.” I was only quoting the author Lionel Shriver. A New Zealand friend had happened to send me the link to a book club interview and Q & A Ms Shriver had recently undertaken at a meeting I think in London. She was asked to talk about the phenomenon in the publishing world of the “sensitivity reader”. (I myself have discussed sensitivity readers before in this blog, with respect to such disparate writers as Ian Fleming and Enid Blyton.) Should an author refer to a character in a novel as a “slave”, a sensitivity reader might wish to change this to an “enslaved person”. I can’t truthfully avow that Ms Shriver rolled her eyes to the ceiling, but I certainly felt she conveyed the sense that the distinction was somewhat precious. Similarly, you ought not to say that somebody is “obese”, (or, indeed “fat”, the word favoured by Roald Dahl) rather that somebody “is living with obesity.” As if, said Ms Shriver, amusingly, obesity was a flat-mate living down the hall. Her point was that this separation of the individual from the condition was, in essence, a lie.
Much as I felt the urge to agree with Ms Shriver, I also felt it worthwhile to reflect on why such fine distinctions are made. There is a pattern here: slave and enslaved person, obese and living with obesity. The point is that people may not wish to be defined by a particular aspect of their situation. I encountered this frequently in medicine: I and my colleagues might refer to “the stroke in Resus”; “the infarct in Bay 4”; “the pissed-fell-over in the waiting room…” It is a dehumanising shorthand. I don’t believe I ever said to a patient, “Your problem is that you’re fat.” I would be more inclined to say, “It would be good for your health if you could lose a pound or two, and here are a couple of things you might try in order to achieve that…” It softens the blow and is intended to be kindly. Of course you might say these are weasel words. I happened to read an article in The West Highland Free Press the other day about the Scottish poet Robert Fergusson, a contemporary of Robert Burns, sometimes referred to as “the other Robert”. He died at the tragically early age of 24, I read, in “the asylum for pauper lunatics”. They certainly didn’t mince their words then. Nowadays I don’t think “asylum for pauper lunatics” would survive the sensitivity reader’s blue pencil. The caring environment for people with cash-flow problems and mental health issues.
But is it not odd that this sort of circumlocution has infiltrated the publishing world, and in particular the realm of fiction? It might be hurtful for a person “living with obesity” to hear that he (she?) is indeed, obese, perhaps even “morbidly obese”, but why should it be hurtful for her (him? What are my preferred pronouns? Let’s not go there today.) …for “them” to read about one fictional character imparting this same information to another fictional character? Surely one of the great strengths of the novel is that the form allows the writer to explore issues that might well be deeply uncomfortable for us all. Sensitivity readers bowdlerise controversy. Why has this come about? Ms Shriver had a very interesting theory. She said that publishing houses are in our time dominated by women, and women have a profound desire to be non-confrontational. I have an idea that a sensitivity reader employed by a publishing house might well have expunged that remark.
Ms Shriver is deeply concerned that universities now tend to shy away from controversy. Whereas seats of learning used to be places which championed freedom of speech, and places where opposing views could be aired and debated, they have now become “safe places” where contentious views may not be expressed because they might be hurtful to the students. Ms Shriver could not understand why the students were not rebelling against this trend. She did not use the expression “snowflake generation”, but this was the implication. Rather than “cancelling” speakers who air views contrary to some kind of perceived contemporary norm, would it not be better to debate with them? This, after all, is what James McCune Smith spent his entire professional life doing, listening to opinions and prejudices that must have been personally deeply hurtful to him, and countering them with arguments based on science, statistical data, and sound argument. I have a sense of pride that my alma mater should have matriculated and graduated this particular student, and is now honouring him, just as I have a sense of shame that my otheralma mater, 44 miles to the east, should have cancelled that great philosopher of the Scottish enlightenment, David Hume, because he once passed a remark, no doubt based on the received wisdom of his time, that one racial group of people was intellectually inferior to another. As a result, the David Hume Tower no longer exists. Cancelled. Disappeared. It never existed. James McCune Smith would never have done that. He would simply have explained, with scientific precision, why on this occasion David Hume had been wrong.
jamescalumcampbell 