“puny, lazy, little runt of a kid:” Debility, Superstition, and the Medical Zoology of Runts in Rural America

This paper traces disability, religion, and animality through the category of the “runt” in twentieth-century America. It argues that the US government saw the racialized category of “superstition” as inherently debilitating for white children, and that such superstition rendered white children incapable of possessing the laboring body necessary for industrializing the rural South and Appalachia. Zoologists likened “white trash” children to the “runt of the litter” in pigs and theorized that their runtiness came from contact with Black religion: conjure and hoodoo disabled white child by giving them hookworm. Thankfully, runts could be rendered productive if treated like sickly animals. To shift from sickly animals to able-bodied children, though, required religion. Narrating the state’s medical zoology around children unearths new histories of religion and disability, particularly how the state came to sacrifice many actual children at the altar of the potential economic gains imagined in the futurity of the child.