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Unlike Dr. Archer’s dispassionate essay on slave medicine nearly a century earlier, this southern Surgeon’s observations on what he sarcastically calls “our brother in black” reeks of racism: Negroes, having “lessened sensibility of the nervous system” and “a greater degree of resistance to shock” than whites, could often be operated on without any form of anesthesia. The Negro also had less “fear of the surgeon and his knife” than whites because, having been “held in bondage, and all of his existence… dominated by the Anglo-Saxon,” he “has come to have implicit confidence in, and to submit without murmur to, the will and opinion of his superior white brother.” After relating one of his first surgical cases in which he entered “a typical negro log cabin, and by the flaring flame of a chimneyless lamp” saved a Black man, with a severe abdominal injury, from becoming “a dead coon”, Fletcher concludes that Blacks were much more prone to contract Syphillis, “due to the laxity of their moral code and their vitiated and exaggerated habit of sexual intercourse.”