Josiah Clark Nott was a surgeon, ethnologist, and enslaver with a medical practice in Mobile, Alabama. Collection consists of two letters and one note, written by Nott from Mobile. The 1839 letter speaks of payment for services and financial difficulties; the 1855 letter comments favorably on a work by Arthur de Gobineau on the theory of racial differences, published in French in the U.S. in 1855, which upheld the superiority of the "Aryan race" and thus promoted slavery as a just and moral system. Nott mentions in the 1855 letter that he had hired a "young friend" to help with the translation of Gobineau's work into English, which was published in 1856 in a much shortened and edited form. The undated note asks about the suitability of evening attire. Acquired as part of the Trent Collection, History of Medicine Collections at Duke University.

Collection contains two letters and a note written by physician and ethnologist Josiah Clark Nott. The first letter was written from Alabama on October 13, 1839 to a George Poe, Jr. in Summerville; in it, Nott comments on payment for services and asks for a financial favor, reporting that his office has been "burnt out." The second letter, October 11, 1855, reports favorably on a book by Arthur de Gobineau on the inequalities between races (published by Lippincott in 1855), a work that advanced the notion of the superiority of the Aryan race and thus claimed that slavery was a moral and just system. Nott comments that he has hired a "young friend of mine" to translate the French work into English (it was published in 1856), and that it is a "bold, original, and altother a thinking book." The undated note inquires about appropriate attire for an evening engagement.

The two letters were removed from a book by Josia Clark Nott and George R. Gliddon: Types of Mankind; or, Ethnological Researches, Based upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania of Races, and upon Their Natural, Geographical, Philological, and Biblical History... (Philadelphia, Lippincott, Grambo & Co., 1854. This book has been cataloged separately as part of the holdings of the Rubenstein Library's History of Medicine Collection, Duke University Libraries.