51 pages • 1 hour read
Harriet A. WashingtonMedical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2007A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Index of Terms
Bioterrorism
Content Warning: The source material and this guide include discussions of racism, eugenics, and medical experimentation.
Bioterrorism is the use of pathogens, bacteria, or other biological weapons to cause widespread death and illness, or the threat to do so to achieve a political or ideological outcome. An example of bioterrorism that Washington cites in Medical Apartheid is the attempt to develop bioweapons that only attack people with darker skin.
Eugenics
The term eugenics was coined by Francis Galton in 1883 to describe the ideology of selectively breeding humans to achieve an ideal population. Eugenics inherently discriminates against certain populations by labeling them as undesirable. There are two main eugenics branches: positive and negative eugenics. Positive eugenics, similar to positive reinforcement, aims to encourage reproduction among “desirable” populations to reproduce certain traits. Negative eugenics, similar to negative reinforcement, aims to suppress the reproduction of “nondesirable” populations. One example of eugenics cited in Medical Apartheid is the forced sterilization of Black women.
Iatrophobia
Iatrophobia is a fear of doctors and is often considered an irrational phobia. Though iatrophobia can affect people of any race, Washington explores the historical justification of iatrophobia among Black Americans—she asserts that their iatrophobia is rational because the medical establishment frequently mistreats Black people.
Informed Consent
The ethical standard of informed consent recurs frequently throughout Medical Apartheid. Washington emphasizes that:
Informed consent is not a signed piece of paper but, rather, the fluid, continuous process by which a researcher informs the subject in detail of what he or she proposes to do, why it is being proposed, and what possible consequences the experiment carries (55).
For doctors, this means that it is not enough to simply ask a patient for their participation before beginning an experiment. Instead, consent must be continually sought throughout the course of the experiment, especially as any new developments arise. In her Epilogue, Washington describes how informed consent continues to be threatened in the present day.
MK-ULTRA and MK-NAOIMI
MK-ULTRA and MK-NAOIMI were two secret CIA projects that involved illegal human experimentation. MK-ULTRA ran from 1953 to 1973 and as Washington notes, it employed many former Nazi researchers who were relocated to the US under Operation Paperclip. MK-ULTRA studied the effects of various psychological stimuli, from psychoactive drugs to torture, on interrogation. Washington notes that Dr. Albert M. Kligman tested LSD on Black prisoners as part of the MK-ULTRA project. She also references MK-NAOIMI, which focused on biological warfare.
Non-therapeutic medical research
Washington distinguishes between therapeutic and non-therapeutic medical research in Medical Apartheid. Non-therapeutic medical research is research that is not intended to treat a disease; it consists of “investigat[ing] medical issues for the benefit of future patients or of medical knowledge” with little regard for the subject’s health (5). The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments are an example of non-therapeutic medical research.
Polygenism
Polygenism is the belief that the human races evolved differently from one another. A disproven theory, Washington references polygenism in her discussions of scientific racism.
Scientific Racism
Scientific racism was a movement in the 19th century that sought to justify the institution of slavery with scientific claims about the nature of Black people. Such claims were based on misapplications of science, and the beliefs of its proponents were, in fact, wholly fictional. In the eyes of scientific racists, Black people were inherently “physically inferior and were liars, malingerers, hypersexual, and indolent” (35). Washington charts how scientific racism emboldened surgeons in the 19th century to abuse Black people for experiments. Likewise, she describes experiments that sought to prove biological differences between Black and white people, such as those performed on Henry Moss in Chapter 3. However, the beliefs of scientific racism continue to impact doctors’ treatment of African Americans. One such belief is that Black people are unable to feel physical pain in the way white people do. This impacts the treatment of African Americans and doctors’ level of empathy with Black patients.
