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By Harriet A. Washington
New York: Doubleday, 2006.
After three days of difficult 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 defined 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 inflicting the abuse. Doctors tortured and abused African American subjects to further scientific 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.
These subjects were given experimental vaccines known to have unacceptably high lethality, were enrolled in experiments without their consent or knowledge, were subjected to surreptitious surgical and medical procedures while unconscious, injected with toxic substances, deliberately monitored rather than treated from deadly ailments, excluded from lifesaving treatments, or secretly farmed for sera or tissue that were used to perfect technologies such as infectious-disease tests. (p. 6)
The medical profession is guilty of these atrocious acts. In addition to bodily harm, this profession has propagated racist social tenets by stripping black patients of their dignity. It exploited African Americans' bodies in public arenas, blamed them for getting sick and defined specifically black disease