| Summary: | This article analyzes the impact that the shift in medical practices – appropriated in different disciplinary frameworks, such as philosophical and natural histories – had on the British debate about slavery in the 1770s. It focuses on the uses of the debates about the orangutan, whose humanization was accompanied by a bestialization of the “savage” man. The article shows how British advocates of slavery employed theories that closely linked orangutans and Blacks, in order to justify their political positions. In so doing, they strengthened the camp of the philosophers, physicians, and politicians who contributed to breaking the unity of the human species.The analysis traces the uses to which Edward Tyson’s work was put. His dissection of an orangutan (actually a chimpanzee) in London in 1698, and his point-by-point comparison with the human body, marked a shift in eighteenth-century medical practices that affected the philosophical and historical definition of man himself. The parallels drawn by the anatomist on the plane of the body and the brain led him to suggest a possible continuity between the animal and the human world, that stressed the fragility of the borders between them. As a result of this experience, the comparison between apes and “savage” men – a category including Blacks and Amerindians, but also the wild boys and girls found in Europe – became a recurrent feature of Enlightenment comparative anatomy, a branch of medicine in full expansion in this period.
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