Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

Content Warning: The source material and this guide include discussions of racism, eugenics, and medical experimentation.

“‘It’s a terrible thing that you are doing. You are going to make African Americans afraid of medical research and physicians! You cannot write this book!’”

A white American medical school professor says this to Washington when the two are discussing Washington’s research. Washington sees this sentiment as characteristic of the white doctors’ attitudes toward the medical abuse of Black people. Many white doctors have chosen to overlook the reality of abuse inflicted upon African Americans rather than acknowledge its long and complicated history.

“Enslavement could not have existed and certainly could not have persisted without medical science. However, physicians were also dependent upon slavery, both for economic security and for the enslaved ‘clinical material’ that fed the American medical research and medical training that bolstered physicians’ professional advancement.”

Washington argues that slavery and American medicine were deeply intertwined from the beginning of US history. Physicians played a key role in supporting slavery, as they worked with enslavers to ensure that enslaved people were healthy enough to work. Similarly, physicians relied on enslaved people as a population on which to experiment and develop new advances in medical science.

“Cartwright suggested that blacks’ physical and mental defects made it impossible for them to survive without white supervision and care, alleging that the cranium of blacks was 10 percent smaller than that of whites, preventing full development of the brain and causing a stunting of the intellect.”

Samuel A. Cartwright, a Louisiana doctor, was one of the foremost proponents of scientific racism. Despite its name, scientific racism relies on misapplications of science to create justifications for the institution of slavery. In the eyes of scientific racists such as Cartwright, Black people were inherently inferior both physically and mentally, requiring the benevolence of white people to assist in their survival.