Black Souls is not a work of medical fiction. The play, however, participates in the tradition of medical theater, as women playwrights of anti-lynching plays drew upon the medico-legal discourse of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to rescript the black theatrical body from its racist, sexist, and ableist roots in the theater of lynching, the surgical theater, and anatomical and postmortem exhibitions, among others. Historian Harriet A. Washington traces a tradition of putting Black bodies on public display in the medical theater, beginning with Dr. J. Marion Sims, who infamously performed dozens of surgeries between 1845 and 1849 on no less than seventeen Black slave women, including Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsy, in pursuit of a fix for the postpartum condition of vesicovaginal fistula. Initially these surgeries were performed before a live audience of white male doctors, who assisted Sims by holding down the slave women as he made incisions without the use of anesthesia. Although the practice of live surgical theater in Sims’s clinic eventually ended, the black theatrical body emerged in a number of public exhibitions throughout the long nineteenth century. Beginning in the 1780s and continuing well into the antebellum period, Black bodies like that of Emily Brown were regularly “burked,” or stolen, from graveyards to become cadavers for anatomical dissection before an audience of medical school students. Africans suffering from albinism appear in P. T. Barnum’s circus during the 1870s and 1880s, advertised as “white negroes,” “white Ethiopians,” and “leopard boys.” And from the 1890s to the 1930s, journalists advertised specific times and locations for lynchings in advance of the mob violence itself so that crowds could gather to watch. They would even take photographs and sell them as souvenirs.

Ann M. Fox identifies “two powerful theatrical misappropriations of the African American body” that women playwrights of anti-lynching plays not only encountered but also used their plays to counter: “those embodied onstage in minstrel shows and supposedly serious plays by ostensibly sympathetic white playwrights, and those staged in medical theater, including the pseudoscientific knowledge that deemed the African American body to be feeble, inferior, and at the disposal of medical culture.” To this, Koritha Mitchell adds a third theatrical performance against which women playwrights must contend: the theater of lynching.