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