Rather than treat the study as an isolated instance of medical abuse, Washington argues that it is part of a continuous pattern of the medical establishment’s neglect of black people. In the study, the US Public Health Service allows a group of syphilitic poor black men to go untreated so that scientists can observe the long-term effects of syphilis. Part 1 closes with Chapter 7’s exploration of the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study.
Many doctors learn how to operate by practicing needless surgeries on African Americans, and cadavers are robbed from black cemeteries to provide material for dissections and autopsies. In Chapters 4 through 6, Washington explores how the bourgeoning 19th-century movement of teaching hospitals principally rely on black bodies to train physicians. In Chapter 3, Washington focuses on sideshow exhibitions of black people, arguing that such displays help to popularize the theories of scientific racism. James Marion Sims helps to pioneer modern gynecology by repeatedly operating on a group of female slaves, without consent or anesthetics. Chapter 2 explores how Southern surgeons develop medical advances through abusive experimentation on slaves. In order to justify the institution of slavery, a number of scientists claim that black people naturally lack physical and mental prowess and require the supervision of white slaveowners to survive-a set of beliefs known as “scientific racism” (32). In Chapter 1, Washington describes the general culture of health care in the Antebellum South, exploring how medical treatment of slaves rested solely in the hands of slaveowners. Washington argues that blacks have been unfairly treated by American doctors since the birth of the United States.
Part 1 of Medical Apartheid focuses on the historic treatment of African Americans.
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