Medical apartheid: the dark history of medical experimentation on black Americans from colonial times to the present

✍ Scribed by William Cohen

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2009
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 70 KB
• Volume: 6
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1742-3341
• DOI: 10.1002/aps.223

✦ Synopsis

After three days of diffi cult labor, 17-year-old Anarcha, a slave on an Alabama plantation in 1845, became one of Dr James Marion Sims's patients. She, along with 10 other women slaves, served the doctor's test subjects as they underwent painful gynecological surgeries, without anesthetics, for four years. Known as the "father of American gynecology," Dr Sims's conducted more than 30 surgeries on Anarcha, leaving her vaginal tissue ravaged, infected and odorous -her condition defi ned by incontinence, pain and suffering.

In her book Medical Apartheid, Harriet A. Washington tells personal stories like those of Anarcha and these women. Washington gives faces to many of the black victims of violent medical experimentation and racially biased investigations, while also portraying the doctors infl icting the abuse. Doctors tortured and abused African American subjects to further scientifi c knowledge and propagate racist, social and economic motives. The historical events Washington catalogues extend from the time of slavery to the present day. In her introduction, Washington summarizes some of the abuses that she details throughout the book.