The Tuskegee Experiments were only the tip of iceberg. African Americans have been used as guinea pigs for horrific experiments by the medical industrial complex for centuries. Further evidence that America's problem is not black social pathology but white social pathology (denial) and national ignorance about the consequences and outcomes of white supremacy in America. kzs
Excerpt from the Washington Post Review
Reviewed by Alondra Nelson The Tuskegee Syphilis Study remains an ignominious milestone in the intertwined histories of race and medical science in U.S. society. Initiated in 1932, this tragic 40-year long public health project resulted in almost 400 impoverished and unwitting African American men in Macon County, Ala., being left untreated for syphilis...Tuskegee was, in the author's words, "the longest and most infamous -- but hardly the worst -- experimental abuse of African Americans. It has been eclipsed in both numbers and egregiousness by other abusive medical studies."
Although medical experimentation with human subjects has historically involved vulnerable groups, including children, the poor and the institutionalized, Washington enumerates how black Americans have disproportionately borne the burden of the most invasive, inhumane and perilous medical investigations, from the era of slavery to the present day. (This burden has become global in the last few decades.) In 1855, John "Fed" Brown, an escaped slave, recalled that the doctor to whom he was indentured produced painful blisters on his body in order to observe "how deep my black skin went." This study had no therapeutic value. Rather, fascination with the outward appearance of African Americans, whose differences from whites were thought to be more than skin deep, was a significant impulse driving such medical trials.
Watch interview of Medical Apartheid author Alondra Nelson @ Terry Howcott's blog post.
tags: health care, medical, white supremacy, racism, pseudo science
No comments:
Post a Comment