Also American

Curriculum unit

Medical Racism & Bioethics

How American medicine used, neglected, and exploited Black bodies — from experiments on the enslaved to Tuskegee to today's maternal-mortality gap.

Unit objectives

Students analyze the history of consent, exploitation, and neglect in Black health care and evaluate its bioethical and present-day consequences.

  1. Lesson 1 · 1 class period

    Experiments on the enslaved

    Objectives

    Examine how early American medicine treated enslaved people as research material.

    Materials

    Timeline entries below; the Medical Racism theme; EJI.

    Study J. Marion Sims's surgeries on Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey, and the wider use of Black bodies in 19th-century medicine.

    Teach from these moments
    1. 1845
      J. Marion Sims experiments on enslaved women

      The "father of modern gynecology" develops surgical techniques through repeated operations on enslaved women — Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey — without anesthesia.

    Discussion questions

    What does consent mean when a person is enslaved? How should we name doctors honored for such work?

  2. Lesson 2 · 1–2 class periods

    Tuskegee and betrayed trust

    Objectives

    Analyze the 40-year Tuskegee syphilis study and its fallout for research ethics.

    Materials

    Timeline entries below; the NLM digitized records.

    Trace the USPHS study, the 1972 exposure, the federal apology, and the modern rules of informed consent it produced.

    Teach from these moments
    1. 1932
      The Tuskegee syphilis study begins

      The U.S. Public Health Service begins a 40-year study that deceives 600 Black men in Alabama and withholds treatment for syphilis even after a cure exists.

    Discussion questions

    How did the study continue for 40 years? How does it shape Black distrust of medicine today?

  3. Lesson 3 · 1 class period

    HeLa, consent, and the present

    Objectives

    Connect Henrietta Lacks, forced sterilization, and the maternal-mortality gap to ongoing inequities.

    Materials

    Timeline entries below; "Lost Mothers"; the Medical Racism theme.

    Examine the HeLa story, coerced sterilization, and present-day disparities as a continuing pattern.

    Teach from these moments
    1. February 1951
      Henrietta Lacks and the HeLa cells

      Doctors take Henrietta Lacks's cells without consent; the immortal "HeLa" line transforms medicine while her family is left unrecognized and uncompensated for decades.

    Discussion questions

    Who owns a person's cells? Why do Black women still die in childbirth at far higher rates?