Samuel A. Cartwright

Biography

Samuel A. Cartwright, born in 1793, was a physician whose career unfolded across the antebellum South, where he studied the maladies of its climate and population. He became a sought-after medical authority, writing and speaking on the diseases he observed, even as the era's assumptions about race and health would later be revisited with critical scrutiny.

During the Civil War, he continued to practice and to advise on public health while the conflict roiled the region, and when he died in 1863 his peers laid him to rest at Greenwood Cemetery, where scholars and neighbors alike remember both his medical zeal and the complex legacy of his time.