Medical apartheid : the dark history of medical experimentation on Black Americans from colonial times to the present
The first comprehensive history of medical experimentation on African Americans. Starting with the earliest encounters between Africans and Western medical researchers and the racist pseudoscience that resulted, it details the way both slaves and freedmen were used in hospitals for experiments conducted without a hint of informed consent--a tradition that continues today within some black populations. It shows how the pseudoscience of eugenics and social Darwinism was used to justify experimental exploitation and shoddy medical treatment of blacks, and a view that they were biologically inferior, oversexed, and unfit for adult responsibilities. New details about the government's Tuskegee experiment are revealed, as are similar, less well-known medical atrocities conducted by the government, the armed forces, and private institutions. This book reveals the hidden underbelly of scientific research and makes possible, for the first time, an understanding of the roots of the African American health deficit.--From publisher description
History
x, 501 pages : illustrations ; 21 cm
9780767915472, 076791547X
192050177
Introduction: The American Janus of medicine and race
pt. 1. A troubling tradition
Southern discomfort: medical exploitation on the plantation
Profitable wonders: antebellum medical experimentation with slaves and freedmen
Circus Africanus: the popular display of Black bodies
The surgical theater: Black bodies in the antebellum clinic
The restless dead: anatomical dissection and display
Diagnosis: freedom: the Civil War, Emancipation, and Fin de Siècle medical research
"A notoriously syphilis-soaked race": what really happened at Tuskegee?
pt. 2. The usual subjects
The black stork: the eugenic control of African American reproduction
Nuclear winter: radiation experiments on African Americans
Caged subjects: research on Black prisoners
The children's crusade: research targets young African Americans
pt. 3. Race, technology, and medicine
Genetic perdition: the rise of molecular bias
Infection and inequity: illness as crime
The machine age: African American martyrs to surgical technology
Aberrant wars: American bioterrorism targets Blacks
Epilogue: Medical research with blacks today