During the 18th through early 20th centuries, white physicians studied black slaves and their descendants in an attempt to identify characteristics that were distinctive of their race. They believed that all questions about health could be answered in the body; therefore, if blacks had poorer health outcomes than whites, the differences must be due to inherent racial weaknesses, not disparities in economic circumstance. Such experiments, as electric shocks, brain surgery, amputations were just some of the medical experiments widely performed on American slaves in the mid-1800s, according to a survey of medical journals published before the Civil War. Medical journals that no longer exist, such as the Baltimore Medical and Surgical Journal and the Western and Southern Medical Recorder, overflow with reports of surgical experiments to treat injuries, birth defects, and tumors, all pioneered on slaves. Doctors often performed the experiments “apparently without pain relief," according to the study, in an era before anesthesia or sterile surgery. Black patients continue to receive less pain medication for broken bones and cancer. Black children receive less pain medication that white children for appendicitis. The failure to recognize the pain of black patients can be tracked as far back in the history of American medicine.
After 1808, when a federal ban on importing slaves from other countries took effect, the perpetuation of American slavery became dependent on domestic slave births. That aligned the economic interests of slave owners — who wanted to promote the healthy births of slave children — and the interests of white physicians — who portrayed themselves as helping slaves but also reaped professional benefits because they could experiment on slaves without their consent. One such physician was Dr. James Marion Sims, a 19th-century physician, who was dubbed the father of modern gynecology because of pathbreaking accomplishments: designing the vaginal speculum, developing a treatment for vesicovaginal fistula (VVF) and building a successful medical career promoting VVF repair.
Gynecological examinations of black women influenced the country’s slave markets, and “slavery, medicine and medical publishing formed a synergistic partnership” in the establishment of gynecology as a medical specialty in the United States. Sims carried out his experiments on women’s genitalia from 1845 to 1849 without anesthesia, which had recently been introduced. In addition to their status as enslaved people, black women were considered appropriate subjects for such experiments based on the widespread belief that black people experienced less pain than white people. Under these incentives, understanding and treating gynecological problems became particularly important. A condition such as VVF threatened a slave woman’s ability to perform hard labor as well as her future reproductive capacity. Sims had plenty of motivation to devote four years to experimenting on 14 slaves with VVF whom he housed on his property, including 30 experiments on a single woman named Anarcha. This experimentation resulted in a landmark development in the history of gynecology: successful treatment of VVF with the use of silver wire. But from the perspective of slave owners, this development was more notable because the new treatment meant that healed slaves could retain their economic value.
In 1894, the Journal of the American Medical Association announced that, for the first time in American history, a public statue had been “erected to the memory of a member of the medical profession”: J. Marion Sims. First unveiled in Bryant Park in New York City, that monument bore an inscription celebrating a physician “whose brilliant achievements carried the fame of American surgery throughout the civilized world.” Eventually, Sims was honored by three statues across the United States. However, in response to growing public outcry, New York City removed the statue of Sims from Central Park, while activists are urging the removal of a similar statue from the Alabama Capitol. Critics say Sims cared more about the experiments than in providing therapeutic treatment, and that he caused untold suffering by operating under the racist notion that Black people did not feel pain.
The systematic influence of institutional racism on American medicine goes far beyond any individual physician. There are documentations of four surgical experiments in particular, dating from 1833 to 1858, that doctors performed on slaves. One, for example, involved severing "healthy looking brain" from a slave with a head injury, killing him. Another removed a tumor from an unnamed young girl's lymph node, which likely made it swell grotesquely around her head. Physician and slave owner William Aiken of Winnsboro, North Carolina, reported an 1852 experiment on a slave named Lucinda, who suffered from a bony growth around her right eye. Aiken and other doctors disfigured her by boring holes in her head — without chloroform, a gas that was used at the time for anesthesia — to remove the growth.
Because Sims’ research was conducted on enslaved Black women without anesthesia, medical ethicists, historians and others say his use of enslaved Black bodies as medical test subjects falls into a long, ethically bereft history that includes the Tuskegee syphilis experiment and Henrietta Lacks. The vestiges of abuse continue to haunt the medical system, and give context to current racial disparities. While many of the inequalities in medicine can be attributed to economic factors like access to good health care, studies have shown minority patients tend to receive a lower quality of care than non-minorities, even when they have the same types of health insurance and the same ability to pay for care.
After 1808, when a federal ban on importing slaves from other countries took effect, the perpetuation of American slavery became dependent on domestic slave births. That aligned the economic interests of slave owners — who wanted to promote the healthy births of slave children — and the interests of white physicians — who portrayed themselves as helping slaves but also reaped professional benefits because they could experiment on slaves without their consent. One such physician was Dr. James Marion Sims, a 19th-century physician, who was dubbed the father of modern gynecology because of pathbreaking accomplishments: designing the vaginal speculum, developing a treatment for vesicovaginal fistula (VVF) and building a successful medical career promoting VVF repair.
Gynecological examinations of black women influenced the country’s slave markets, and “slavery, medicine and medical publishing formed a synergistic partnership” in the establishment of gynecology as a medical specialty in the United States. Sims carried out his experiments on women’s genitalia from 1845 to 1849 without anesthesia, which had recently been introduced. In addition to their status as enslaved people, black women were considered appropriate subjects for such experiments based on the widespread belief that black people experienced less pain than white people. Under these incentives, understanding and treating gynecological problems became particularly important. A condition such as VVF threatened a slave woman’s ability to perform hard labor as well as her future reproductive capacity. Sims had plenty of motivation to devote four years to experimenting on 14 slaves with VVF whom he housed on his property, including 30 experiments on a single woman named Anarcha. This experimentation resulted in a landmark development in the history of gynecology: successful treatment of VVF with the use of silver wire. But from the perspective of slave owners, this development was more notable because the new treatment meant that healed slaves could retain their economic value.
In 1894, the Journal of the American Medical Association announced that, for the first time in American history, a public statue had been “erected to the memory of a member of the medical profession”: J. Marion Sims. First unveiled in Bryant Park in New York City, that monument bore an inscription celebrating a physician “whose brilliant achievements carried the fame of American surgery throughout the civilized world.” Eventually, Sims was honored by three statues across the United States. However, in response to growing public outcry, New York City removed the statue of Sims from Central Park, while activists are urging the removal of a similar statue from the Alabama Capitol. Critics say Sims cared more about the experiments than in providing therapeutic treatment, and that he caused untold suffering by operating under the racist notion that Black people did not feel pain.
The systematic influence of institutional racism on American medicine goes far beyond any individual physician. There are documentations of four surgical experiments in particular, dating from 1833 to 1858, that doctors performed on slaves. One, for example, involved severing "healthy looking brain" from a slave with a head injury, killing him. Another removed a tumor from an unnamed young girl's lymph node, which likely made it swell grotesquely around her head. Physician and slave owner William Aiken of Winnsboro, North Carolina, reported an 1852 experiment on a slave named Lucinda, who suffered from a bony growth around her right eye. Aiken and other doctors disfigured her by boring holes in her head — without chloroform, a gas that was used at the time for anesthesia — to remove the growth.
Because Sims’ research was conducted on enslaved Black women without anesthesia, medical ethicists, historians and others say his use of enslaved Black bodies as medical test subjects falls into a long, ethically bereft history that includes the Tuskegee syphilis experiment and Henrietta Lacks. The vestiges of abuse continue to haunt the medical system, and give context to current racial disparities. While many of the inequalities in medicine can be attributed to economic factors like access to good health care, studies have shown minority patients tend to receive a lower quality of care than non-minorities, even when they have the same types of health insurance and the same ability to pay for care.
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