Medical Apartheid by Harriet A. Washington

I submit that African Americans are not exhibiting an undue reticence toward accepting the vaccine. No one concerned with issues of public health and racial justice can afford not to read Medical Apartheid, a masterful book that will stir up both controversy and long-needed debate.Harriet Washington: Andrew, thank you very much for asking that question. At last, it provides the fullest possible context for comprehending the behavioral fallout that has caused black Americans to view researchers-and indeed the whole medical establishment-with such deep distrust.

The product of years of prodigious research into medical journals and experimental reports long undisturbed, Medical Apartheid 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. Shocking new details about the government’s notorious Tuskegee experiment are revealed, as are similar, less-well-known medical atrocities conducted by the government, the armed forces, prisons, and private institutions.

Moving into the twentieth century, it shows how the pseudoscience of eugenics and social Darwinism was used to justify experimental exploitation and shoddy medical treatment of blacks, and the view that they were biologically inferior, oversexed, and unfit for adult responsibilities. It reveals how blacks have historically been prey to grave-robbing as well as unauthorized autopsies and dissections. Starting with the earliest encounters between black Americans and Western medical researchers and the racist pseudoscience that resulted, it details the ways both slaves and freedmen were used in hospitals for experiments conducted without their knowledge-a tradition that continues today within some black populations. Medical Apartheid is the first and only comprehensive history of medical experimentation on African Americans. From the era of slavery to the present day, the first full history of black America’s shocking mistreatment as unwilling and unwitting experimental subjects at the hands of the medical establishment.

Medical Apartheid by Harriet A. Washington