“Enslavement could not have existed and certainly could not have persisted without medical science. However, physicians were also dependent upon slavery, both for economic security and for the enslaved ‘clinical material’ that fed the American medical research and medical training that bolstered physicians’ professional advancement.”
- Harriet A. Washington (Medical Apartheid, 2006)
Firsthand account of Medical Apartheid
(Harriet A. Washington)
written by Chelsea Lawrence
Considering that one of the purposes of our discussion materials is to better understand the reasons for distrust in the black community, I thought it would be best to find the most accurate and unbiased information to examine the unethical experimentation and usage of eugenics for justification. As a result of my search, I identified a novel by Harriet A. Washington that won the National Book Critics Circle Award for general nonfiction in 2006. The process of deciphering the records and handwritten notes took years.
Black Americans were subjected to historical treatment in ways that Washington pointed out as disturbing but accurate. Let's start with the concept of malingering, which is pretending to be sick to obtain advantage. There were often many slaves who suffered from illnesses that were foreign to their immune systems due to the mass and immediate translocation of Black Americans for slavery. Despite that, slaves who complained about being sick to their masters were often beaten for "malingering" while they were actually ill. Medicine was often advanced unjustly in the "Antebellum South." James Marion Sims, a man without a doctorate degree who experimented on female slaves and their infants, is one example. Sims repeatedly experimented on the same women, sometimes more than once each day. It is almost inconceivable to think that these medical advancements came from a troubled past since he is now called "the father of gynecology." The idea that Black Americans were morphologically different was the driving force behind these unethical experiments. Researchers believed black people were incapable of being a second thought due to their mental and physical capabilities. Therefore, many doctors failed to provide anesthesia during procedures, even after it was developed, and gave the scientific community a reason to slip morals to a low standard.
Exhibits pitted black people against one another to encourage slave owners' and scientists' ideas about blacks as "angry black men" and "jezebels." As a brown person, you were no longer human; you were livestock. In the wake of the slave trade, whites found more reasons to invalidate the human aspect of black people. A "more fit race" of slaves was created through eugenics. Women and men were often bred as animals if they had desirable traits, such as being stronger, quicker, and capable of bearing the healthiest children, which they sold elsewhere.
A few of these aspects of the book are critical to help us understand the distrust within black communities. From colonial to present time, Washington gave us a chronology of medical experiments on Black Americans that irrevocably planted the seeds of distrust.
Chelsea Lawrence
Medical Apartheid: A discussion about black distrust in the medical community
10/30/21
Black Americans were subjected to historical treatment in ways that Washington pointed out as disturbing but accurate. Let's start with the concept of malingering, which is pretending to be sick to obtain advantage. There were often many slaves who suffered from illnesses that were foreign to their immune systems due to the mass and immediate translocation of Black Americans for slavery. Despite that, slaves who complained about being sick to their masters were often beaten for "malingering" while they were actually ill. Medicine was often advanced unjustly in the "Antebellum South." James Marion Sims, a man without a doctorate degree who experimented on female slaves and their infants, is one example. Sims repeatedly experimented on the same women, sometimes more than once each day. It is almost inconceivable to think that these medical advancements came from a troubled past since he is now called "the father of gynecology." The idea that Black Americans were morphologically different was the driving force behind these unethical experiments. Researchers believed black people were incapable of being a second thought due to their mental and physical capabilities. Therefore, many doctors failed to provide anesthesia during procedures, even after it was developed, and gave the scientific community a reason to slip morals to a low standard.
Exhibits pitted black people against one another to encourage slave owners' and scientists' ideas about blacks as "angry black men" and "jezebels." As a brown person, you were no longer human; you were livestock. In the wake of the slave trade, whites found more reasons to invalidate the human aspect of black people. A "more fit race" of slaves was created through eugenics. Women and men were often bred as animals if they had desirable traits, such as being stronger, quicker, and capable of bearing the healthiest children, which they sold elsewhere.
A few of these aspects of the book are critical to help us understand the distrust within black communities. From colonial to present time, Washington gave us a chronology of medical experiments on Black Americans that irrevocably planted the seeds of distrust.
Chelsea Lawrence
Medical Apartheid: A discussion about black distrust in the medical community
10/30/21
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