Medical Apartheid Quotes

“Physicians, patients, and ethicists must also understand that acknowledging abuse and encouraging African Americans to participate in research are compatible goals. History and today's deplorable African American health profile tell us clearly that black Americans need both more research and more vigilance.”
― Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

“Old measures of health not only have failed to improve significantly but have stayed the same: some have even worsened. Mainstream newspapers and magazines often report disease in an ethnocentric manner that shrouds its true cost among African Americans. For example, despite the heavy emphasis on genetic ailments among blacks, fewer than 0.5 percent of black deaths—that’s less than one death in two hundred—can be attributed to hereditary disorders such as sickle-cell anemia. A closer look at the troubling numbers reveals that blacks are dying not of exotic, incurable, poorly understood illnesses nor of genetic diseases that target only them, but rather from common ailments that are more often prevented and treated among whites than among blacks.”
― Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

“Despite its image as a disease that affects middle-aged white men, heart disease claims 50 percent more African Americans than whites and African Americans die from heart attacks at a higher rate than whites. African Americans are more likely to develop serious liver ailments such as hepatitis C, the chief cause of liver transplants. They are also more likely to die from liver disease, not because of any inherent racial susceptibility, but because blacks are less likely to receive aggressive treatment with drugs such as interferon or lifesaving liver transplants. Even”
― Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

“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.”
― Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

“Because race is not a biological reality, medications based upon group biological differences will work only for some African Americans. This will lead to a false sense of security, and will stymie the search for more inclusive, more efficacious, and, in a word, better treatments. We must recognize the powerful stigmatizing potential of genetic approaches to disease, especially when they are touted as the only approach.”
― Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

“In fact, researchers who exploit African Americans were the norm for much of our nation’s history, when black patients were commonly regarded as fit subjects for nonconsensual, nontherapeutic research. This book explores the many reasons that blacks are so vulnerable, but ultimately it is because American medical researchers remain a racially homogeneous group, and I show how the racial homogeneity of American medical researchers lies at the very heart of the problem.”
― Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

“At the same time, medical experts of every persuasion agree that African Americans share the most deplorable health profile in the nation by far, one that resembles that of Third World countries. When Dr. Harold Freedman observed that the health status of Harlem men resembles that of Bangladeshis more closely than that of their Manhattan neighbors, he did not exaggerate. Twice as many African American babies as babies of other ethnic groups die before their first birthday. One and half times as many African American adults as white adults die every year. Blacks have dramatically higher rates of nearly every cancer, of AIDS, of heart disease, of diabetes, of liver disease, of infectious diseases, and they even suffer from higher rates of accidental death, homicide, and mental illness. Before they die young in droves from eminently preventable diseases, African Americans also suffer far more devastating but equally preventable disease complications, such as blindness, confinement to wheelchairs, and limb loss.”
― Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

“Infant mortality of African Americans is twice that of whites, and black babies born in more racially segregated cities have higher rates of mortality. The life expectancy of African Americans is as much as six years less than that of whites.”
― Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

“Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and the most inhumane.”
― Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

“Geography, tradition, and culture intersect to make blacks likely research subjects for new technologies, but race and economics tend to place them outside the marketplace for these same technologies when they are perfected.”
― Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

“History of medicine courses, medical museums, and even much medical scholarship leave one unaware of the long tragic history of medical research with African Americans.”
― Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

“American university research centers have historically been located in inner-city areas, and accordingly, a disproportionate number of these abuses have involved experiments with African Americans.”
― Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

“involved experiments with African Americans. These subjects were given experimental vaccines known to have unacceptably high lethality, were enrolled in experiments without their consent or knowledge, were subjected to surreptitious surgical and medical procedures while unconscious, injected with toxic substances, deliberately monitored rather than treated for deadly ailments, excluded from lifesaving treatments, or secretly farmed for sera or tissues that were used to perfect technologies such as infectious-disease tests.”
― Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

“A closer look at the troubling numbers reveals that blacks are dying not of exotic, incurable, poorly understood illnesses nor of genetic diseases that target only them, but rather from common ailments that are more often prevented and treated among whites than among blacks. Three”
― Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

“In the early 1700s, this mirrored the situation in England and the rest of Europe, but medicine on the Continent began to undergo modernizing changes, although these were very slow to cross the Atlantic. Europe began to embrace public-health measures and medical advances such as widespread vaccination, scientific medical education, and the rise of the hospital, but American progress lagged behind, especially in the insular South. The”
― Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

“The South was a particularly unhealthy region and was home to 90 percent of American blacks, the majority of whom were enslaved until 1865.”
― Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

“The point of this chapter’s unflattering précis of nascent American medicine is not to castigate it for its primitivism, but to put blacks’ historical aversion to medical care into context, for most antebellum blacks were subjected to southern medicine. The”
― Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

“Almost no effective treatments existed for prevalent diseases until the eighteenth century. Until the late 1830s, the lack of effective anesthesia made the few common surgical procedures horribly painful and all others impossible. Between”
― Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

“But in dissecting this shameful medical apartheid, an important cause is usually neglected: the history of ethically flawed medical experimentation with African Americans. Such research has played a pivotal role in forging the fear of medicine that helps perpetuate our nation’s racial health gulf. Historically, African Americans have been subjected to exploitative, abusive involuntary experimentation at a rate far higher than other ethnic groups.”
― Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

“far from sharing in the bounty of American medical technology, African Americans are often bereft of high-technology care, even for life-threatening conditions such as heart disease. The”
― Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

“Why Research Issues Still Matter Why do centuries of mutual distrust over medical research matter today? What does the sad history of exploitative experimentation augur for black health?”
― Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

“Dangerous, involuntary, and nontherapeutic experimentation upon African Americans has been practiced widely and documented extensively at least since the eighteenth century.”
― Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

“Whatever his true cure rate, Sim's silver sutures did help to end a real medical tragedy for many women, and some excuse the abuse of enslaved women on this basis. This essentially utilitarian argument presents an ethical balance sheet, with the savage medical abuse of captive women on one hand and countless women saved from painful invalidism on the other. However, such an argument ignores the ethical concept of social justice, and these experiments violated this essential value because the suffering and the benefits have been distributed in an unfair way, leading to distributive injustice.”
― Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

“I challenge us to change, because as Charles Darwin once observed, “It is not the strongest species that will survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”
― Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

“Betsey’s voice has been silenced by history, but as one reads Sims’s biographers and his own memoirs, a haughty, self-absorbed researcher emerges, a man who bought black women slaves and addicted them to morphine in order to perform dozens of exquisitely painful, distressingly intimate vaginal surgeries. Not until he had experimented with his surgeries on Betsey and her fellow slaves for years did Sims essay to cure white women.”
― Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

“Two other slave women peer around a sheet, apparently hung for modesty’s sake, in a childlike display of curiosity. This innocuous tableau could hardly differ more from the gruesome reality in which each surgical scene was a violent struggle between the slaves and physicians and each woman’s body was a bloodied battleground.”
― Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

“the preamble of the National Sickle Cell Anemia Control Act, enacted in 1972 to foster sickle-cell research, screening, counseling, and education, is untrue: “Two million Americans suffer from sickle cell disease.” Actually, 2 million people were healthy carriers22 and fewer than 100,000 Americans suffered from sickle-cell anemia. The erroneous claim coupled with its constantly reinforced perception of sickle-cell disease as a black disorder left Americans with the mistaken impression that a good portion—one in twelve—of African Americans suffered from sickle-cell anemia.”
― Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

“The vaccine debate encapsulates more than a scientific disagreement; it also reflects the lingering iatrophobia from the exploitative abuse of African American children. This abuse has had a chilling effect on lifesaving research because parents are withholding their permission from positive as well as abusive research. History has shown them how difficult it is to distinguish between the two.”
― Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

“The health of thirty million African Americans is continually imperiled, partly because many eschew effective care rather than risk the tender mercies of government-sponsored medicine. Although many studies and abuses contributed to this iatrophobia, Tuskegee remains the iconic symbol of racialized medical abuse.”
― Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

“fact, the first legally proven fatality from domestic bioterrorism was the 1973 murder of West Oakland school superintendent Dr. Marcus A. Foster, an African American, who was felled by a cyanide-tipped bullet from the arsenal of the Symbionese Liberation Army.22”
― Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present