Medical Apartheid Annotated Bibliography

Jamani Montague
American Studies
Professor McGehee
20 November 2014
Annotated Bibliography

Washington, Harriet A. Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. New York: Doubleday, 2006. Print. Medical Apartheid is the first cohesive study of the deplorable history of the physical and medical abuse and misuse of African Americans. Harriet Washington uncovers the history of medical experimentation on black Americans from the colonial times to the present. Washington’s discoveries are relevant to my project because she traces specific examples of racist, medical abuse, ranging from grave robbing and the “Hottentot Venus”, to the Tuskegee Experiment and theories put into

Public Health Service conducted an experiment on 400+ African-American male sharecroppers. The men were given syphilis, without their consent, by white doctors who intended to trace the evolution of the disease to learn its effect on the human were not warned about the effects the disease would have on their bodies, and were not given any treatment. The men were deceived into believing they were patients in a government study, and after 40 years, more than 100 men had died from either syphilis or related complications.This is important to my research paper because it uncovers an illegal, unethical experiment on black bodies, and suggests that many more like it may have been

James H. Jones traces the evolution of medical ethics and decision making in healthcare, and outlines the consequences of the Tuskegee Experiment in our recent medical history. Bad Blood focuses on the idea that Tuskegee Study has become a “symbol of black oppression and a metaphor for medical neglect towards black Americans”. Black Blood also proposes that the black community's collective anger and distrust caused by the Tuskegee Experiment, consequently paved the way for black Americans so avoid efforts by health professionals to combat AIDS in the African American community. This is important to my research project because it explains the effects of the Tuskegee Experiment on American politics and law, and the tension it caused between the African American community and health