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Tonya
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 3801
Registered: 07-2006
Rating: 
Votes: 2 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, January 01, 2007 - 08:22 pm: | 
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First, do no harm (to whites)
Reviewed by Alexander Zaitchik
Sunday, December 31, 2006
Medical Apartheid
The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans From Colonial Times to the Present
By Harriet A. Washington
DOUBLEDAY; 501 Pages; $27.95
If race is the haunted house of American history, Harriet Washington opens the door on the torture room in "Medical Apartheid," her blood-spattered history of black America's long and frequently nonconsensual relationship with experimental medicine.
This room of horrors, as Washington details, contains skeletons predating the Republic. Indeed, the first African American encounter with Western medicine was the slave-ship quack, who would condemn sick passengers to the sharks. Once in the New World, slaves suffered a Southern medical culture that meant, at best, the application of "9 drops of essence of rawhide" as a cure for most ills. At worst, it meant being strapped to a board while a mad scientist with dirty hands and no anesthesia used cobbler's tools to crack and pry your skull bones into new positions.
Experimental operations on the skulls of slave children, Washington writes, were a favorite pursuit of a particularly sadistic South Carolinian doctor named J. Marion Sims, widely revered today as the "father of gynecology." Once he outgrew his fascination with skull formation, Sims earned fame pioneering a treatment for vesicovaginal fistula, a debilitating internal rupture associated with 19th century childbirth. For years, Sims experimented on a group of slave women, to whom he refused anesthesia, even after its invention in the 1840s. Since Victorian mores forbade looking much under the skirts of white women, most breakthroughs in women's health, including the C-section, were perfected on female slaves, often under the gaze of a gaggle of fascinated and, Washington suggests, perhaps titillated, white doctors.
"Medical Apartheid's" most gruesome antebellum vignette finds Sims restraining a resistant slave named Sam and removing a large part of his jawbone, against his will and sans anesthesia. Such experimental operations were common in the Old South, and Washington convincingly traces black America's lingering iatrophobia (fear of doctors) back to this anguished history.
"By the mid-nineteenth century," she writes, "African Americans had already associated Western medicine with punishment, loss of control over their most intimate bodily functions, and degrading public displays."
Emancipation did not end these associations. The rise of the hospital movement and interest in detailed anatomical study fueled demands for test subjects and cadavers, needs routinely met by luring poor blacks with false promises and raiding black cemeteries.
Washington devotes much illuminating attention to the most notorious post-slavery racial crime of American medicine: the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service between 1932 and 1972. For 40 years, more than 100 black subjects -- members of what the PHS considered a "syphilis-soaked race" -- were denied treatment, even and especially after the discovery of penicillin in 1943. The research required that they suffer and die, the more slowly the better.
But while acknowledging its importance in the popular imagination, Washington is quick to note that Tuskegee was hardly unique. The Rockefeller Institute in New York, for example, conducted a study in 1910 that saw 470 black syphilitics injected with a deadly strain of malaria to test its effectiveness as treatment. Black Americans were also disproportionately used at the dawn of the nuclear era as subjects in government inquiries into the effects of radiation. Within this book's thick catalog of horrors is the story of how the Atomic Energy Commission and the Quaker Oats Co. co-sponsored a secret program in which radioactive oatmeal was fed to orphans in Waltham, Mass.
This is the American century with a Nazi accent. For the 20th century saw the rise of the "Mississippi appendectomy" (involuntary sterilization), a practice born from the eugenics movement sweeping the United States before it became the state ideology of Nazi Germany. In a chapter titled "The Black Stork," Washington examines the dual legacy of feminist pioneer Margaret Sanger, who championed women's right to contraception but was also a committed eugenicist whose Birth Control Review advocated systematically reducing the fertility of black women. In this project Sanger had federal support, Washington writes, and the proliferation of government-sponsored Planned Parenthood clinics deepened suspicions among African Americans that birth control and state clinics constituted a form of state genocide.
Washington's chilling history ends with contemporary case studies. At the Incarnation Children's Center in New York, Columbia University doctors continue to administer experimental AIDS drugs to minority orphans, even after many develop painful and debilitating reactions. As for current clinical trials in Africa, Washington describes the continent as the new "laboratory for the West," where unsuspecting patients regularly receive experimental therapies that might never receive state sanction in the United States or Europe.
Washington only occasionally loses her way, as in a digression into the anthrax scare of 2001 that notes the heavy black presence in Washington, D.C.'s, postal workers But these lapses are few in an otherwise fascinating, chilling and important book.
Alexander Zaitchik is a journalist in Washington, D.C.
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URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/12/31/RVGNGN44B91.DTL |
Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 6376
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, January 01, 2007 - 10:52 pm: |
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This is America's dirty little secret, one that rivals what the Nazi's did to the Jews. This country eventually found its moral compass in that it now goes through the motions of acknowledging such atrocities, putting in place regulations to prevent their re-occurence, all of this as George Bush wages a war that is killing and mutilating thousands of innocent civilians, even as he condones the execution of the cruel and merciless Saddam Hussein. And so it goes. |
Lola_ogunnaike
Regular Poster
Username: Lola_ogunnaike
Post Number: 242
Registered: 10-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, January 02, 2007 - 02:07 am: |
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I feel sick. |
Zuriburi
Regular Poster
Username: Zuriburi
Post Number: 177
Registered: 11-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, January 19, 2007 - 02:11 pm: |
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Here is an interview with the auther of Medical Aparthied Harriet Washington on Democracy Now!
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/19/1432231
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