Surviving Science: A Brief History of America’s Development of the ‘Negro Problem’ in Healthcare
By: Ally Christiani
A depiction of J Marion Sims named the “The Father of American Gynecology” who was defamed after historians revealed he operated on slave women (pre-anesthetic) to perfect his procedures for his wealthy white clients; ultimately leaving many of these slave women in unfathomable conditions. Shown is the slave Anarcha.
Centuries of slavery, oppression, and discriminatory practices have contributed to the crisis in healthcare that now face many modern African Americans. Racial inequality exists and has prevailed in many different systems throughout America; however, all convene into creating severely disproportionate rates of mortality, disease, and overall wellness. Currently, 13.8% of African Americans are reported to have fair or poor health compared to 8.3 % of whites. African Americans have the highest mortality rate for all cancers compared to any other racial group. There are 11 infants’ deaths per 1000 live births for African Americans which is double the national average.
It is critical to connect these present statistics with the occurrences of the past to understand how the ideologies and practices that were developed then, have had dire affects on the continuously expanding health gap that persists in our nation’s healthcare system.
Scientific myths were developed throughout the 17th and 18th centuries in attempts to validate the Transatlantic Slave Trade through a predominant theme of black inferiority. Intellectuals around the world including philosophers, doctors, and researchers (who were slave owners) consistently tried to find means to justify enslaving another human species by weaponizing science to produce an extensive collection of pseudoscience.
Black people were described as “racially different” from their skeletal construction to the framework of their consciousness. To prove these theories, esteemed scientists claimed black people have inferior bodies that made them more subservient yet, also somehow more tolerant to pain.
To achieve these theories often plantation owners are documented handing over their slaves to research scientists to perform medical experiments on them. Most of these experiments were done in efforts to continue to find physical differences between black and white people.
A British doctor in 1787 named Benjamin Mosely contributed to this pseudoscience in his published manual that claimed black people had a stronger threshold for pain and therefore, could withstand surgeries with ease. His evidence: “I have amputated the legs of many Negroes who have held the upper part of the limb themselves.”
John Brown, a slave from Georgia was able to tell his story in an autobiography about his experience with these types of experiments after escaping to England in 1855. His story is grim, and details how a doctor named Dr. Thomas Hamilton (a trustee of the Medical Academy of Georgia) tried to prove that black skin is thicker than white skin. Dr. Hamilton also tried to prove that “black people had large sex organs and small skulls—which translated to promiscuity and a lack of intelligence—and high tolerance for heat.” These “findings” were published in medical journals nationwide.
Examples of this extreme exploitation in the name of scientific and medical discovery is littered throughout history. Thomas Jefferson published the idea of a “weak lung capacity” in black people that can only be corrected through exhaustive labor. Another outrageous theory called “drapetomania” was used to describe the “mental illness” slaves developed that would cause them to run away from their owners. The treatment, as described in The New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal, was to “whip the devil out of them.”
The Eugenics movement, developed in the late 19th century was the study of improving the human race by governing genetic properties of individuals (e.g. race). One of the founders of the Eugenics movement, declared in his published medical journal (1896), that: through extensive research on the black condition “birth, morbidity, and mortality, and social (e.g. employment and educational conditions) data observed higher death rates among the “colored race” in comparison to “whites”.
The conclusion drawn from this study attributed these differences to an “inferior vital capacity” instead of “conditions of life.” To serve as a reminder, this study was done in the 1890’s, during the Reconstruction period at the height of segregation. Sociologists agree that segregation produced a string of effects including: “the concentration of poverty, social disorder and social isolation, and pathogenic conditions in residential environments” that all has a direct effect on the health of African Americans in their environment.
These types of prejudiced-infused studies and journals were taught in medical school curriculums thus, creating a uniform idea of how to use and abuse black bodies for nefarious experiment that persisted into the 20th century.
Another example, the Tuskegee Experiment, occurred from 1932-1972 in Macon County, Alabama. 600 poor black men, predominantly sharecroppers (freed slaves that continued to work on plantations for small pay) agreed to participate in a study of Syphilis under the guise that they would receive treatment for the disease. Instead, researchers wanted to track the disease’s progression and although they had the cure to stop it, they watched as the disease slowly either killed participants or left them severely impaired. Once the story broke in 1972, public outrage put an end to the horrific study.
The 1619 podcast created by Nikole Hannah Jones from the New York Times explains further the conditions that existed during the Antebellum, Reconstruction, and post Reconstruction time periods that created the environment of dense poverty and persistent health issues amongst African Americans.
She details the story of Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler, the first African American woman to serve as a physician in the United States. Dr. Crumpler served during the Civil War before being stationed in Virginia. Newly emancipated slaves had no access to any health care system that existed in the USA. Physicians performed home visits but would not visit the homes of black people and the few hospitals that existed refused to treat them. It became a national crisis, as freed black people were forced to reside in deplorable conditions becoming susceptible to outbreaks and disease. Their dead bodies would be seen lining city streets.
The Freedmen’s Bureau created by President Lincoln in order to provide a basis by which black people can integrate into society developed a medical division to serve this crisis, and hospitals were built for black people predominantly in the south. However, the government paid little attention to the extremity of the crisis and sent 100 doctors to serve over 4 million patients with no beds, little to no supplies, and a small pox outbreak on their hands. Dr. Crumpler describes the scene as a “complete mess”.
Naturally, a similar theory to one already discussed emerges during this period that suggested nature was doing an assigned duty by wiping out the inferior race of black people in this country; thus, the government should no longer interfere.
As it is known, this is a country whose premise, is to trust in God, so this ideology persisted and was actually debated on the Senate floor. Consequently, the Freedmen hospitals suffered and eventually went extinct through a lack of funding.
When the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, many thought this would be a turning point in healthcare for African Americans in this country. The Act stated that all hospitals must desegregate, however, that was an impossible task for the federal government to ensure without the States’ help, and naturally, many southern States were late to comply. It was not until Medicare passed in 1966 (which determined funding amounts for many hospitals) that 3,000 hospitals desegregated and began treating black patients.
The notorious African American sociologist and author, W.E.B. Du Bois asked in his book The Souls of Black Folk: “How does it feel to be a problem?”
The “problem” Du Bois is referring to is the means that African Americans consistently are labeled in this country. There is a problem with their bodies and skulls, a problem with their lungs and blood, a problem with their intellect, a problem with their desires for freedom… a problem with integrating them into a society that brought them but does not want them.
America called it the “Negro problem.”
Like a petulant child who refuses to accept the consequences of their actions, America has yet to acknowledge its role in orchestrating the health gap. This makes it all the more difficult to correct it, when the blame charges the victim instead of the bully.
The historic precursors detailed in this article had a profound influence on the socioeconomic factors that continue to have a tumultuous effect on the overall health care of African Americans today. In my next two series on the topic of healthcare as a systemic racism issue, I will detail how those effects continue today, and try to answer the question of why Covid-19 has impacted the black community at a much higher rate than others in this country.
Sources:
www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277953613005121
www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/07/medical-racism-history-covid-19/
www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/reports/2020/05/07/484742/health-disparities-race-ethnicity/
www.nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/freedom/1865-1917/essays/racialuplift.htm
www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/racial-differences-doctors.html
www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2013/feb/05/django-unchained-racist-science-phrenology
www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/07/medical-racism-history-covid-19/
www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)32032-8/fulltext
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2593958/pdf/jnma00341-0013.pdf
www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S1742058X11000233
1619 Podcast: Spotify, episode 4: How The Bad Blood Started
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