Samuel Cartwright, a physician and professor of “diseases of the Negro” at the University of Louisiana in New Orleans, now Tulane University. His widely circulated paper “Report on the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race,” published in the May 1851 issue of The New-Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal, cataloged supposed physical differences between white people and Black people, including the claim that Black people had lower lung capacity—what he called “vital capacity.”20
