Pages 319-323 within: Samuel Latham Mitchill and Edward Miller, eds. The Medical Repository… Original Essays And Intelligence, Relative To Medicine, Chemistry, Agriculture, Geography And The Arts…Especially As They Are Cultivated In America… (8vo), half leather and boards, gilt-lettered morocco spine label. Third Hexade.
As a graduate of the College of Philadelphia in 1768, Dr. Archer received the first Medical degree “on the American continent”. He fought in the Revolutionary War and, being a lawyer as well as a Doctor, was active in politics, serving in the Maryland legislature and later in the U.S. Congress. But he also had an active medical practice. Archer here reports on two cases of “midwifery” he observed in female slave patients who had difficulty giving birth due to genital inflammation they had suffered as children, “not because they are blacks, but from the occupation of the mothers, who have not time from their daily labour [in the fields] to attend their children and keep them clean by frequently washing.” At the end of the essay, Archer also describes another case which has since made medical history – still cited in Obstetrics textbooks - as the first published report of “superfecundation”: After a “poor” white man, having “cohabited” with his wife, left for work in the morning, “a negro man came into the cabin in which he woman lay in bed, and was prompted to have intercourse with her; he accordingly obtained permission” and they too had sex. The woman, having become pregnant, delivered two children – “one white and the other a mulatto”. Archer mentions a similar case “in which a white man cohabited with a negro woman after her husband, and the negro woman brought a black child and a mulatto at birth.” Somewhat remarkably, given that Archer himself as a pro-slavery legislator, he relates these cases without any “moral” strictures on inter-racial intercourse, being careful in the first case to note that the relations of the Black man and white woman were consensual. His intention in writing the report was merely “to account for one of the wonderful operations of nature, the propagation of the human species.” If not the first American monograph on “slave medicine”, this is certainly the first study of the medical genetics of African-American slavery.