Diseased Roots: Hugh Hugher Toland and the Role of Slavery in Shaping Medicine Education in the American West

In 1851, Hugh Huger Toland, a surgeon from Columbia, South Carolina, was on the verge of reinventing himself. Already a successful entrepreneur and physician, he chose California as the place where he could further diversify his holdings and build upon his wealth. By investing the profits he had made from owning, treating, and experimenting on enslaved individuals, he had the financial resources to exploit land and business opportunities that brought him huge earnings. With his newfound wealth, Toland embarked on his passion project: establishing a medical college. Founded in 1864, Toland Medical College would later become the first medical department of the University of California, thus becoming the first medical school in California and the Western United States. This talk examines two defining features of its origin: Toland’s use of San Francisco as a site to invest his profits from U.S. chattel slavery into medical education, and his ability to manipulate and reconfigure medical spaces to ensure his dominance in the field.

Unlike the Southern city where Toland was from, where the ties to slavery are direct and visible, San Francisco's slavery lineage is more opaque. This talk aims to bring that lineage to light. It will demonstrate how the financial advantage provided by slavery enabled Toland to position himself to reap rewards and outcompete others in the city's medical education landscape. Additionally, it will show how the lessons he learned in the slavery-dependent medical education spaces of Columbia, South Carolina (most notably, reconfiguring therapeutic spaces into sites for formal instruction) became a winning blueprint for his college’s business plan. This talk will conclude by considering the significance of using an enslaver’s blueprint as the foundation of medical education in the American West.