11 Quotes by Harriet A. Washington

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.