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Medical Apartheid: Medical Experimentation on Black Americans From: Prema
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Southern Discomfort From: Prema
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Medical Apartheid: Medical Experimentation on Black Americans
Posted by: "Prema"
prema@hilobay.com prema139
Mon Jan 22, 2007 3:57 pm (PST)
Greetings,
Syphillis Experimentation
Anatomical Dissection
Prison Inmate Experimentation
Cosmetics Research
Pharmaceuticals Research
Vaccinations
Medical Sterilization
Medical Experimentation in Africa
This is a list of some of the themes discussed in the enclosed
interview with author, Harriet Washington, author of MEDICAL
APARTHEID: MEDICAL EXPERIMENTATION ON BLACK AMERICANS.
The enclosed text is a partial transcript of "Medical Apartheid".
If you want to LISTEN to the entire interview [TRT: 42:03], then go
to the end of the article and choose a hyperlink to follow.
forward!
devotion, prema
++++++++++++ +++++++++ +++++++++ +++++
Democracy NOW - Friday, January 19th, 2007
MEDICAL APARTHEID
The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from
Colonial Times to the Present
Medical scholar Harriet Washington joins us to talk about her new
book, "Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation
on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present." The book
reveals the hidden underbelly of scientific research and the roots of
the African American health deficit. It also examines less well-known
abuses and looks at unethical practices and mistreatment of black
people that are still taking place in the medical establishment today.
A new report by the American Cancer society shows that
African-Americans are still more likely than any other group to
develop and die of cancer. The study states that socio-economic
factors play the largest role in this disparity - African Americans
have less access to health care and information, and are less likely
to get screening and medical treatment. Well, a new book offers one
answer into why black Americans deeply mistrust American medicine.
"Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on
Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present" is the first and
only comprehensive history of medical experimentation, abuse and
neglect of African Americans. The book reveals the hidden underbelly
of scientific research and the roots of the African American health
deficit. It begins with the earliest encounters of blacks and the
medical establishment during slavery, looks at how eugenics and
social Darwinism was used to justify medical experiments conducted by
the government and the military - and offers new details about the
infamous Tuskegee Experiments that began in the 1930's.
"Medical Apartheid" also examines less well-known abuses and looks at
unethical practices and mistreatment of blacks that are still taking
place in the medical establishment today. With us now is the Author
of the book - Harriet Washington. She is a medical writer and editor
-- and a visiting Scholar at DePaul University School of Law.
Harriet Washington. Medical writer and editor. She is a visiting
Scholar at DePaul University School of Law. Previously she was a
Fellow in Medical Ethics at Harvard Medical School and at Stanford University. She is the author of the new book, "Medical Apartheid."
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help
us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our
TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
AMY GOODMAN: We're joined now by the author of the book, Harriet
Washington, a medical writer and editor, a visiting scholar at DePaul
University School of Law. We welcome you to Democracy Now!
HARRIET WASHINGTON: Thank you. I'm very happy to be here.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, this is a fascinating book. First of all, why did
you take it on?
HARRIET WASHINGTON: I took it on for two reasons: one, I'm a very
naturally curious person, and when I was still in premedical
undergraduate at the University of Rochester, I was working in a
hospital and came across some case files that dramatically showed a
disparity, a racial disparity, in people who were slated to receive
kidneys, and that piqued my curiosity.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean?
HARRIET WASHINGTON: Well, I came across some old case files in a
forgotten file folder, and one was of a black gentleman, one was of a
white gentleman.
The white gentleman's file was thick and full of testaments to his
loving family, his insurance support, his determination to live and
detailed really Herculean attempt on the part of medical personnel to
procure a kidney for him, kidney transportation still being
relatively new then.
The file of the black gentleman was very thin. The word "Negro"
appeared on every page of it, and somebody had underlined it on a
social profile, right above the single line that indicated that the
medical staff's plans for him were to help him to prepare for his
imminent demise.
The white gentleman and the black gentleman were very similar in
their profiles, but they were treated differently, and I wanted to
know whether this was a consistent feature of medical care or just an
anomaly. And as I began looking into it, I just became intrigued in
the vast differences in the way African Americans were used in research.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, your book doesn't just deal with modern times,
but you go back into the -- to actually the beginning of the country --
HARRIET WASHINGTON: Absolutely.
JUAN GONZALEZ: -- and exactly how these kinds of disparities began to
manifest themselves. Could you talk to us a little bit about
--especially about those early years, especially during the period of slavery?
HARRIET WASHINGTON: Right, the early years, it was quite chilling.
First of all, it's important to understand that there was a
scientific animus called "scientific racism," which at that time was
simply science, and it posited that black people were very, very
different from whites, medically and biologically. And this provided
a rationale and an underpinning not only for the institution of
slavery -- slavery probably could not have persisted if there hadn't
been this medical underpinning -- but also for the use of blacks in research.
For example, it said that blacks were less intelligent, sub-human,
perhaps not even quite human, that they didn't experience pain, that
they were immune to diseases like malaria and heat sickness that made
it impossible for whites to work in the field, but made them perfect
for labor in the field. So this set of beliefs, this set of
scientific beliefs, was not buttressed by any real data, but only by
the needs of the community. And this actually gave permission for
doctors to acquire slaves for research.
They also had a variety of conditions for which -- a good example is
reproductive health. All of the early important reproductive health
advances were devised by perfecting experiment on black women. Why?
Because white women could say no. White women were not interested in
having doctors looking at their genitalia during the Victorian era,
and white women were not interested in undergoing painful surgery
without anesthesia, but black women could not say no.
So this animus began, as you say, in the very early days of our
republic, and it simply snowballed until, by the time of the Civil
War, blacks were being used, almost exclusively in some venues and in
very high proportion in others, for everything, from vaccine design,
experimental surgeries. And they were never consensual; you never
asked their permission, and rarely were they therapeutic. They were
mostly to expand medical knowledge.
AMY GOODMAN: We have to go to break. When we come back, I want to ask
you about the Tuskegee Experiment, which a lot of people know about
it, but you say actually the emphasis on that obscures a lot of other
experimentation that has gone on over the last centuries. We are
talking to Harriet Washington. She is author of the book Medical
Apartheid. We'll be back in a minute.
[break]
Source:
http://www.democrac ynow.org/ article.pl? sid=07/01/ 19/1432231
To purchase an audio or video copy of this entire program, click here
<https://store. democracynow. org/?pid= 10&show=2007- 01-19> or call 1
(888) 999-3877.
++++++++++++ +++++++++ +++++++++ ++++++++
LISTEN TO THE ENTIRE INTERVIEW
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READ THE BOOK:
Medical Apartheid: Medical Experimentation on Black Americans
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Southern Discomfort
Posted by: "Prema"
prema@hilobay.com prema139
Mon Jan 22, 2007 3:58 pm (PST)
++++++++++++ +++++++++ +++++++++ +++++++++
book excerpt
MEDICAL APARTHEID
by Harriet A. Washington
Chapter One
SOUTHERN DISCOMFORT
MEDICAL EXPLOITATION ON THE PLANTATION
Celia's child, about four months old, died last
Saturday the 12th. This is two negroes and three
horses I have lost this year. -DAVID GAVIN, 1855
Frederick Gardiner, a peripatetic Mormon
physician, left among his travel memoirs an
impression of the nineteenth-century slave markets of Washington, D.C.:
There are a great number of Negroes, nearly all
of whom are Slaves. And on different Streets are
large halls occupied as Marts or stores, for the
sale or purchase of Slaves ... While I have been
looking at one of these places on Gravier Street,
Two Gentlemen have arrived, one of whom I have
Seen in the Saloon, he is a young Planter and
come to purchase a girl to take care of his
children, or whatever duties he may think proper
to impose upon her. The other person is a Doctor
whom he has brought with him for the purpose of
examining her. They pass along the front of the
row in company with the agent or Salesman. As
they move forward One is called upon to stand up,
then another while a passive examination is made.
Then finally he discovers a bright mulatto, who
appears about 16 years of age and is quite good
looking. She is ushered into a private room where
she is stripped to a nude condition and a careful
examination is made of all parts of the body by
the Dr. and is pronounced by him to be sound. The
money is then paid and she is transferred to her
new owner ... I have heard that the Masters beat
and scourge them most cruelly. But I have not
seen anything of the kind, nor do I believe that
it occurs very often. For the southern people as
a class are Noble minded kind hearted people, as
can be found in any country ... And moreover it
would be against their own interests, to brutally
treat their Slaves. As no planter desired to have
sick negroes on his hands. According to my
judgment so far as my experience extends, I
believe that the Negroes as a class, are far more
humanely treated and taken care of, Than are the
laboring classes of European countries.
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. Gardiner's vignette suggests the
integral role of medicine in enslavement and
repeats a key belief-that slave owners and
physicians shared an interest in preserving the
slave's health, "as no planter desired to have
sick negroes on his hands." But although medicine
was essential to enslavement, the apparent
solicitude for the health of slaves was not all
it seemed. Rather, the medical interests of the
slave were often diametrically opposed to the
interests of his owner and of American
physicians. From the first, antagonism reigned
between African Americans and their physicians.
Between the seventeenth- century advent of African
settlers to North America and the end of the
nineteenth century, the slave and the physician
shared an unrecognizably primitive medical world.
The "germ theory" that revealed the microbial
nature of much disease and led to the first grand
waves of disease cures was still well in the
future: The existence of pathogens such as
bacteria, viruses, and fungi was unsuspected.
Almost no effective treatments existed for
prevalent diseases until the eighteenth century.
Until the late 1830s, the lack of effective
anesthesia made the few common surgical
procedures horribly painful and all others impossible.
Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries,
medicine in the United States reflected a
narrowly limited understanding of disease and a
rather cursory training of medical practitioners.
Public-health institutions were few, feeble, and
ephemeral, rising momentarily with epidemics of
yellow fever or smallpox and subsiding from
neglect after the crisis resolved. Even the
simplest public-health measures-hand washing and
antiseptic techniques, clean water, sound,
pathogen-free housing, an untainted food supply,
sewage management, and quantitative disease
reporting were all in the future. Because there
were only a few effective disease therapies and
no antibiotics, epidemics of yellow fever,
malaria, tuberculosis, and other infectious
diseases frequently raged unchecked. In the early
1700s, this mirrored the situation in England and
the rest of Europe, but medicine on the Continent
began to undergo modernizing changes, although
these were very slow to cross the Atlantic.
Europe began to embrace public-health measures
and medical advances such as widespread
vaccination, scientific medical education, and
the rise of the hospital, but American progress
lagged behind, especially in the insular South.
The point of this chapter's unflattering pr cis
of nascent American medicine is not to castigate
it for its primitivism, but to put blacks'
historical aversion to medical care into context,
for most antebellum blacks were subjected to southern medicine.
The South was a particularly unhealthy region and
was home to 90 percent of American blacks, the
majority of whom were enslaved until 1865. The
first blacks arrived in the colonies in 1619, and
by 1700 there were only about 20,000 blacks. But
as the slave trade flourished, 20,000 more blacks
arrived each year. Although 30 percent of
transported slaves died in the nightmare of the
Middle Passage, there were 550,000 chattel slaves
in the United States by 1776, when blacks
constituted 20 percent of the U.S. population. By
1807, slave importation was legally prohibited
throughout the country, and by 1860, the nation's
four million enslaved blacks had a value
equivalent to four billion dollars today. In some
states, the black population completely comprised
slaves: Alabama, for example, forbade the presence of free blacks.
The South was the nadir of the American medical
experience, visited by a deadly triple
confluence-the pathogens of North America,
Europe, and Africa. This unholy trinity yielded a
bewildering array of unfamiliar infectious
diseases, such as hookworm, types of malaria, and
yellow fever, incubated by a subtropical climate
that was hospitable year-round to pathogens that
could not thrive in the colder North. Even
familiar European illnesses flared anew in
strangely virulent forms, abetted by the hot,
marshy climate, poor sanitation, and a
public-health vacuum. Although the South harbored
a highly visible affluent class, the region's
relative poverty led to a dearth of medical care
and a host of unrecognized nutritional- deficiency
diseases. So did enslavement.
A dramatically misunderstood set of disease
etiologies led to the adoption of heroic remedies
calculated to kill or cure. Through the
eighteenth century, Western medicine was not only
misinformed but dangerously so. Caustic medicines
of the period often contained metabolic poisons
such as arsenic, or calomel, a compound of
mercury and chlorine that was used as a
purgative. Many other remedies contained highly
toxic substances such as mercury and addictive
Schedule II narcotics, including the opiates
laudanum, opium, and morphine, as well as cocaine
derivatives. These medicines addicted, sickened,
or killed outright; they also could trigger
chemical pneumonitis, or progressive lung injury,
if inhaled during a bout of iatrogenic, or
physician-triggered , vomiting. No studies seem to
have been done on this point, but such lung
injuries may have helped to account for slaves'
higher death rate from respiratory disease.
Induced vomiting was an everyday event because
the common denominator of medical techniques in
this period was the violent release of bodily
fluids. Copious bleeding, blistering, and the
induction of violent diarrhea were standard
therapies. Harsh laxatives or "draughts" such as
calomel or jalap produced copious diarrhea, which
leached nutrients, water, and electrolytes from
the body. They also invited painful bedsores,
which were open to infection unchallenged by
antibiotics. These crude therapies were not only
unpleasant but debilitating to ill persons and
even to the strong and healthy. Arsenic, for
example, produced not only the intended vomiting
and diarrhea but also a wide range of other
problems, including fainting, heart disease,
disorders of the nervous system, gangrene, and
cancers. Mercury's very serious effects included
injury to the nervous system, profound mental
deficits, hair and tooth loss, kidney and heart
disease, lung injury, and respiratory distress.
Mercury crossed the placental barrier and
concentrated in breast milk, contributing to the
high black infant-death and birth-defect rates.
Such ministrations were often fatal. The 1799
death of George Washington, hastened by a copious
bloodletting the debilitated former president
could ill afford, is perhaps the best-known
example of a patient finished off by the
misguided heroics of eighteenth-century medicine.
However, whites of the slave-owning class enjoyed
better initial health, better nutrition, and less
exposure to environmental pathogens and parasites
than did enslaved blacks. Slave owners did not
suffer from overwork and exposure, so they were
better able than slaves to withstand the rigors
of bloodletting. Sensing this, many physicians
and scientists discouraged bloodletting for
slaves. Thomas Jefferson, statesman and amateur
physician-scientist , wrote unequivocally, "Never
bleed a negro." But in their everyday practices,
physicians didn't listen. Dr. Lunsford Yandell
wrote, "On March 16, 1833 I was called before
sunrise to visit a Negro woman. I took from her
twelve ounces of blood ... I waited about fifteen
minutes when she had a severe convulsion." Such
techniques as cupping (the use of heated glass
jars to create a partial vacuum that drew blood
upward to the skin's surface or through an
incision in the skin) and trephination (the
therapeutic drilling of holes in the skull) were
risky for pampered, well-nourished adults living
in relatively healthy environments. But they were
fatal attentions for sickly, undernourished, and
exhausted slaves and for their children, who were
at even higher risk of succumbing to anemia or dehydration.
Enslaved African Americans were more vulnerable
than whites to respiratory infections, thanks to
poorly constructed slave shacks that admitted
winter cold and summer heat. Slaves' immune
systems were unfamiliar with, or na ve to,
microbes that caused various pneumonias and
tuberculosis. Parasitic infections and abysmal
nutrition also undermined blacks' immunological
rigor. Before antibiotics and sterile technique,
surgery was an often-fatal affair. Unaware of the
connection between bacteria and infection,
surgeons operated in their street clothes and
with dirty hands in filthy environments, such as
the shacks that served as "slave hospitals." Even
minor incisions or injuries could proceed to life
threatening infections with frightening rapidity.
Southern medicine of the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries was harsh, ineffective, and
experimental by nature. Physicians' memoirs,
medical journals, and planters' records all
reveal that enslaved black Americans bore the
worst abuses of these crudely empirical
practices, which countenanced a hazardous degree
of ad hoc experimentation in medications,
dosages, and even spontaneous surgical
experiments in the daily practice among slaves.
Physicians were active participants in the
exploitation of African American bodies. The
records reveal that slaves were both medically
neglected and abused because they were powerless
and legally invisible; the courts were almost
completely uninterested in the safety and health
rights of the enslaved. The practice of hiring
slaves out further endangered enslaved workers by
removing much of an employer's incentive to keep
the slave healthy and safe. Some humane
plantation owners were careful to choose less
risky work venues, but a great danger of slave
death or disability was inherent in some forms of
mining, tobacco production, rice farming, and
most plantation work. In these settings, the
slave's possible death became part of his owner's
commercial calculations. Ominously for blacks,
the owners, not the enslaved workers, determined
safety and rationed medical care, deciding when
and what type of care was to be given. Because
professional attention was expensive, most owners
dosed their own slaves as long as they could
before calling in physicians, who usually saw
slaves only in extremis, as a last resort. In
clinical notes, medical journals, and memoirs,
physicians consistently decried the planters'
tendency to rely upon the cheaper ministrations
of overseers, slaves, and mistresses in order to
save expense. Physicians' records also expressed
disgust at the conditions in which enslaved
workers were kept. Historian Richard Shryock
observed in 1936: "Of all critics, the Southern
physician was perhaps in the best position to
report on the physical and moral treatment of the
slaves. When he stated, as he sometimes did, that
Negroes were overworked and underfed, he can
hardly be suspected of antislavery bias since he
was the friend of the planter who employed him.
As a matter of fact, he usually approved of the
institution. " Planters' own records and slave
narratives corroborate physicians' complaints
that planters provided professional medical care
only when they deemed it necessary to save the slave's life-often too late.
Owners also restricted access to medical care by
routinely accusing sick blacks of malingering.
Slave narratives and planters' records reveal
that an owner faced with a sick slave was likely
to believe the illness was feigned. In her
excellent and nuanced history, Working Cures:
Healing Health and Power on Southern Slave
Plantations, Sharla Fett describes how, in 1859,
slave owner William Massie resentfully recorded
that his eighty-year- old slave "Patty" had just
died "of I know not what disease.... She has been
saying she was sick for near a year and always
pretended to be sick." No doctor was ever
summoned to investigate, and not even Patty's
death seems to have exonerated her from charges
of malingering. The enfeebled Patty was no longer
valuable in the fields or as a "breeder," so the
nature of her sickness was inconsequential.
Owners relied upon doctors to tell them whether
slaves were malingering, but physicians were less
than objective. Dr. W. H. Taylor, called in
consultation for an enslaved man, prefaced his
assessment with the phrase "remembering that
simulation was a characteristic of his race".
Doctors and owners wrote articles in which they
shared medical ruses and techniques calculated to
get blacks, healthy or not, back into the fields.
Dr. M. L. McLoud even wrote his master's thesis
on the fraudulent illnesses of slaves. He shared
an incident in which he had accidentally
administered an overdose of ammonium carbonate, a
corrosive white powder that was often used as
smelling salts, to a slave shamming an epileptic
fit. The burning sensation shocked her into
abandoning her performance, and McLoud, like many
other doctors, began to advocate such veiled
medical violence when confronted with
questionable illness in slaves. But masters also
responded to suspected malingering or prolonged
illness with frank abuse. Thomas Chaplin wrote in
his planter's journal, "Mary came out [of the
sick house] today or rather was whipped out."
Owners and physicians also blurred the
therapeutic line by referring jocularly to
whipping as "medicine" for malingering slaves.
One complaining woman was "treated with a cowskin
or hickory switch to scourge her" [emphasis
added]; other doctors recommended that an owner
apply "9 drops of essence of rawhide" or "oil of
hickory" to the back of a sick slave.
(Continues.. .)
Excerpted from Medical Apartheid by Harriet A.
Washington Copyright © 2007 by Harriet A. Washington. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may
be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely
for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Doubleday
Copyright © 2007 Harriet A. Washington
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-385-50993- 6
SOURCE: <http://www.denverpo st.com/books/ ci_4952927>
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This posting is provided to the individual
members of this group without permission from the
copyright owner for purposes of criticism,
comment, scholarship and research under the "fair
use" provisions of the Federal copyright laws and
it may not be distributed further without
permission of the copyright owner, except for "fair use."
Author