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

Sims was a 19th-century Southern doctor and was considered to be a pioneer in gynecological practices. Sims appears several times throughout Medical Apartheid, and in many ways, he serves as the exemplar of American medical abuse that Washington chronicles in the book. Washington opens Medical Apartheid with a description of Sims’s legacy, noting its two sides—“one benign, one malevolent” (2). Sims has long been celebrated by the American medical establishment for his discovery of a cure for vesicovaginal fistula—life-threatening openings on the vagina that can occur after difficult childbirths. Sims’s discovery saved numerous women’s lives, and Sims was accordingly canonized with numerous “hospitals [that] still bear his name” (1). However, Sims’s cure only came through the abuse of enslaved women, on whom he operated without anesthesia for years in his search for a cure.

Eunice Rivers was a Black nurse involved in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. The Public Health Service hired Rivers to serve as a liaison between the white doctors and their Black research subjects. Rivers met with the subjects regularly, often driving them to their appointments with the medical researchers. Over the many years of the study, Rivers became a “friend” of the men (165). However, Rivers was also tasked with keeping close track of the patients to ensure that the researchers were able to perform autopsies after the men died. After the study became public, Rivers received public scrutiny for her role in the experiment. Washington argues that one should not place too much of the blame on Rivers, as she was a nurse who would have had little understanding of the science behind the experiment. Further, Washington suggests the scientists used Rivers as a “cynical ploy” to make the scientific team seem racially-mixed and deflect any criticisms of racist motivations (276).

Sanger was a prominent eugenicist known for her feminist activism that paved the way for both Planned Parenthood clinics and the birth control pill. In Medical Apartheid, Washington focuses on Sanger’s controversial thoughts on African Americans and population control. As a eugenicist, Sanger believed that reproduction had to be carefully managed to ensure that only the most genetically fit individuals reproduced. However, Sanger’s ideas were motivated by deeply racist beliefs that Black people were naturally criminal and possessed poor intelligence. As such, Sanger actively worked to curb the population growth of African Americans. In 1932, Sanger published “The Negro Number,” a journal focused on discussing eugenics in Black populations. Several years later, Sanger founded the Negro Project, which opened clinics in predominantly Black neighborhoods such as New York City’s Harlem. These clinics intentionally sought to “reduce the Black population” by promoting a variety of birth control tactics (197).