Medical Apartheid The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present By Harriet Washington
Medical Apartheid
The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black
Americans from Colonial Times to the Present
By Harriet Washington
Oral Culture
“Don’t let the lion tell the giraffe’s story”
Stories of medical abuse dismissed as myth
Cultural and political bias coupled with Western literary bias
“Race, culture and economics have trumped medical and scientific truths at every turn”
Medical culture mirrors larger culture of inequality
Antebellum South
Deadly triple confluence—the pathogens of North America, Europe, and Africa
Subtropical climate, poor sanitation, public-heatlh vacuum, nutritional-deficiencies
“Treatments” nearly always ineffective, often harmful Mercury, arsenic, bloodletting
Slaves often thought to be feigning illness Whipping or beating as “medicine”
Medical Racism 1839: Caucasians have larger skulls, brains 1851: Made up “black” diseases
Drapetomania-desire to ecape Hebetude-shiftlessness or laziness Dysthesia Aethiopica-desire to destroy owners’
property Struma Africana-type of “black-only” tuberculosis Cachexia Africana-eating non-food substances
Treatments for whites were thought to kill blacks
“Immunities”
Thought to be completely immune to malaria as well as yellow fever, smallpox, pellagra, typhoid, heat exhaustion
Thought to be immune to physical, emotional pain Justified torture, maimings,
beatings, brandings and the exposure to painful medical procedures
Experiments
Doctors did not ask consent or explain their reasoning or intent
No formal ethical or legal codes for consent Experiments included everything from
inflicted blistering “to see how deep black skin went” to involuntary sterilization to untried pharmaceuticals, innoculations, and dangerous surgeries
James Marion Sims
Experimented on black children including puncturing their parietal bones and move them into new positions
Experimented on black women peri- and post-natally, making repeated incisions into vaginal tissues Offered no anesthesia during
procedures but were drugged with morphine for weeks afterward
Anatomical Dissection
Black bodies considered expendable
John Does, homeless, destitute blacks often ended up as cadavers in teaching hospitals
Grave-robbing in African American cemeteries was common
Black prisoners were often executed and used for dissection
Remains rarely re-interred
Tuskegee Syphilis StudyMacon County, Alabama, 1932
Lied to 600 poor black men with syphilis Studied disease progression, not treatment even
though curable with penicillin Promised health care and drugs; often giving
aspirin only Public Health Service characterized blacks
as “intellectually inferior, impetuous, degenerate, and, above all, at the mercy of frighteningly powerful sexual drives” Reality: 61% of cases were non-venereal
Tuskegee Syphilis StudyMacon County, Alabama, 1932
Sick men were tracked until death to ensure autopsy
Study continued for forty years during which men were denied treatment
Tuskegee became iconic symbol of racialized medical abuse and a source of iatrophobia (fear of medical treatment)
Eugenics Early 1900s: “selective procreation to refine the
human race while conquering social dysfunction” Demonization of black parents Black women forced to have “Mississippi
Appendectomy” 1915, Dr. Harry Haiselden kills black infants because
they would have gone through life as “defective” Haiselden makes propoganda film “The Black Stork”
Eugenics continued with Nazis
Birth Control By 1941, 100,000 Americans had been
involuntarily sterilized, disproportionately black Medical records falsified to cover hysterectomies
Birth control pill pushed but no care for nutrition, infectious diseases, infant mortality etc.
Dangerous IUDs were dispensed mainly in inner-city clinics Infections, cancer, permanent infertility
Norplant, Depo-Provera trials
Other Research Subjected to injections of radioactive
materials, including black infants Used radiation to whiten skin, remove
hair Experiments on black prisoners
1 prison, 1 doctor tested 153 experimental drugs in 4 years
Black children not exempt from experiments ‘Fen’ administered to measure violent
propensity, 1997 Infants tested for HIV, status withheld,
1980s
Cultural Mirror
“Medical ill-usage has not strictly paralleled scientific knowledge. Rather it has mirrored the larger American cultural beliefs as well as politics and economic trends.”
As the social and legal landscape for black Americans has improved, so have research practices.
Unfortunate exportation of similar practices to Africa