Morton's theories were very popular in his day, and he was a highly respected physician and scientist. The anthropologist Aleš Hrdlička called Morton "the father of American physical anthropology".[11] Crispin Bates has noted that Morton's "systematic justification" for the separation of races, along with the work of Louis Agassiz, was also used by those who favoured slavery in the United States, with the Charleston Medical Journal noting at his death that "We of the South should consider him as our benefactor for aiding most materially in giving to the negro his true position as an inferior race."[9]