Med News Today

A Must Read

February in Black History Month and we recommend the following book:

Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

Review exerpt:

Slavery and racism represent the evil underside of America's history -- along with the slaughter of Native Americans. We need go no further than the current Bushevik regime to see how many Americans still see white Christian supremacy over people of color as some sort of divine destiny.

That self-serving "mandate from God" was used as a justification for slavery -- and, as "Medical Apartheid" so ably illustrates, allowed the medical exploitation of American blacks in the most gruesome of experiments.

What could be dismissed by many readers as a book too troubling to take on is given a starred review by Publishers Weekly and praised for the author's gripping unfolding of this too-neglected racist legacy that America would like to bury.

In extolling the book, Publishers Weekly notes: "This groundbreaking study documents that the infamous Tuskegee experiments, in which black syphilitic men were studied but not treated, was simply the most publicized in a long, and continuing, history of the American medical establishment using African-Americans as unwitting or unwilling human guinea pigs. Washington, a journalist and bioethicist who has worked at Harvard Medical School and Tuskegee University, has accumulated a wealth of documentation, beginning with Thomas Jefferson exposing hundreds of slaves to an untried smallpox vaccine before using it on whites, to the 1990s, when the New York State Psychiatric Institute and Columbia University ran drug experiments on African-American and black Dominican boys to determine a genetic predisposition for "disruptive behavior." Washington is a great storyteller, and in addition to giving us an abundance of information on "scientific racism," the book, even at its most distressing, is compulsively readable."

posted by nattietodd @ 7:45 AM