Page:Memoir of Isaac Parrish, M.D. - Samuel Jackson.djvu/22

 He then continued his investigations at home, and particularly in relation to the effects of solitary confinement and sedentary labor on the African race. Dr. B. H. Coates, a member of the same Society, had called their attention as early as 1840 to the peculiarly injurious operation of solitude and sedentary labor on this companionable people, naturally fond of talk and sunshine; and he subsequently brought the subject before the American Philosophical Society, in a scientific communication, which was published in their Transactions for 1843. This paper attracted much attention at the time, and caused no little discussion; but, strange indeed, it led to no practical results.

Hence it was that in April, 1849, Dr. P. brought a resolution before the Society, for the appointment of a committee, to report the disproportionate mortality and the relative length of sentences between the white and colored prisoners. He wrote the report, and read it at the meeting of the Society in November, 1849. They ordered this paper to be printed entire in the next number of their Journal, that two hundred and fifty extra copies of the Journal be printed, and that copies of the report itself be sent to the Governor, to the Judges of the Supreme Court, and of the Courts of Common Pleas.

In this report, he shows that the mortality was much greater among the negroes than the whites; and he quotes the authority of Dr. Darrach, formerly visiting physician, and also the labors of Dr. Coates, in proof of his statement. But he gives also the statistics of mortality for twenty years, and shows that in the whites it averaged 4½ per cent, per annum, while the negroes perished at the rate of 18 per cent. In the County Prison, the disproportion was nearly the same; and also nearly the same at Pittsburg and Trenton. He acknowledges that the mortality of the blacks is greater outside of the prison; as Dr. Emerson has shown, that during ten of the above twenty years, the deaths of negroes was 3¼ per cent., and that of the whites, 2.37. Accordingly, four blacks to one white die in prison, while in the open community not quite two to one. "Causes," he says truly, "must, therefore, exist in the prison which produce results that do not exist out of the walls." These causes he finds, as did Dr. Coates, in the peculiar corporeal and mental constitution of the African, that requires company, merriment, sunshine, and exercise, with warmer apartments than our penitentiary meanly and criminally affords.