Medical Racism

The history of American medicine is entangled with the exploitation of Black people. The "father of modern gynecology," J. Marion Sims, perfected his techniques through surgeries on enslaved women — Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey — without anesthesia. In 1932 the U.S. Public Health Service began the Tuskegee study, deceiving 600 Black men and withholding treatment for syphilis for 40 years. In 1951 doctors took Henrietta Lacks's cells without consent, building a medical-research empire on the "HeLa" line while her family went unrecognized for decades.

The pattern persists: coerced sterilizations into the 1970s, and a maternal-mortality rate for Black women three to four times that of white women regardless of income. It is one of the clearest expressions of how Black life was, and is, devalued — and of greed in the form of unconsented research and profit.

Harriet A. Washington's Medical Apartheid (2007) gathers four centuries of this history into one account: enslaved people were treated as ideal experimental subjects precisely because they were property who could not refuse. The surgeon J. Marion Sims perfected his techniques on enslaved women without anesthesia; medical schools robbed Black graves for cadavers; the U.S. government let Black men go untreated for syphilis at Tuskegee for forty years; Henrietta Lacks's cells were taken without her knowledge and seeded a billion-dollar industry; and tens of thousands of Black women were sterilized without consent. The through-line is consent denied — bodies used, like labor before them, because the law and the culture valued them as less. See chattel-slavery, racial-caste, and greed.