In the book Medical Apartheid, written by Harriet A Washington, the author focuses on the hidden, dark history of American experimentations done on African Americans during slavery times to more present days. Washington’s main purpose of the book is to educate readers about the abusive, deep history of experimentations done on African Americans and to explain why African Americans mistrust American medicine so much and are unwilling to participate in any research or screenings. Although Washington represents many specific cases of abusive experimental evidence—in order to reveal why African Americans mistrust American medicine today—her main arguments were that these experiments were done without consent, that physicians and scientists were …show more content…
left unpunished for the cruelty done in these secretive experiments, that there was a disparity amongst blacks, and that the most dangerous findings in science were done on blacks through incentives. African Americans are being mistreated and experiments are done on them without their consent.
Furthermore, these doctors had no legal or ethical codes to conduct experimentations or research on African Americans. For example, during 1998, “172 employees, all but one of them black, sued Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory when they learned that they had secretly been tested for syphilis, pregnancy, and sickle-cell trait without their knowledge that the blood and urine they had supplied during required physical examinations would be tested…” (314). This indicates that there was no consent from these blacks and scientists where secretively testing immunities for sickle-cell on them without any permission whatsoever. The release of this experiment was against the Americans with Disabilities Act and these researchers had no right to release information without the patient’s consent. Furthermore, experiments that had no patient’s consent varied from blisters “to see how deep black skin went” to threatening surgeries, sterilization, inoculations, and not tested pharmaceuticals (54). Without consent, all experiments are considered as unethical. A patient’s consent is important because it is huge determination of privacy and respecting the patient’s wishes. Without any consent, it is indicating that patient’s do not have rights about their own privacy, which was against the law during colonial times and in present days. Some ethical guidelines include the right to withdraw from the study …show more content…
at anytime and the ability to have protection of privacy and well-being. As a result, being able to control a person’s privacy is part of having an ethical study versus having an unethical study. Furthermore, physicians and scientists are unpunished for the cruelty they have brought upon blacks in secretive experiments and are instead being honored and praised for their accomplishments.
Some of these scientists mainly did unethical experimentations on blacks by mistreating and abusing African American slaves, children, and the overall population of blacks just to gain more scientific studies. For example, Dr. Thomas Hamilton was said to be a southern gentlemen and known as a well-respected physician; however, Hamilton bought and raised slaves just for experimentation. One of Hamilton’s experimental victims was John Brown, where he burned him to the point of blisters, fainting, and flayed skin and also performed surgical torture on him (54). This example indicates that these praised upon doctors and these so called “health-care providers” were gaining the appraisal and the title of “providing for others” that they should not have because of their torturing experimentations done on blacks. Although these physicians came about multiple treatments and other beneficial research, they targeted specifically minorities and performed illegal actions on them in order to get their research results, which indicates the evilness presented in these doctors that many whites trust. Another example of a physician that was highly respected and praised for treating patients was James Marion Sims. Sims performed extremely cruel experimentations on black children and black women. For
example, James “took a sick black baby from its mother, made incisions in its scalp, then wielded a cobbler’s tool to pry the skull bones into new positions” (62). On the other hand, for black women, Sims made incisions into their vaginal tissue without any anesthesia during the surgical procedure and drugged them with morphine afterwards (62). These example experiments done on black children and women indicated the abusiveness and cruelness of these doctors whom are known to be well respected. These experiments show how doctors fooled people and patients about who they are and how they actually practice. For that reason, patients in today’s society should be aware that there were some doctors that were abusive and unpunished for what they have done and could possibly still exist in American medicine.
The book, Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, by James H. Jones, was one of the most influential books in today’s society. The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment study began in 1932 and was terminated in 1972. This book reflects the history of African Americans in the mistrust of the health care system. According to Colin A. Palmer, “James H. Jones disturbing, but enlightening Bad Blood details an appalling instance of scientific deception. This dispassionate book discusses the Tuskegee experiment, when a group of physicians used poor black men as the subjects in a study of the effects of untreated syphilis on the human body”(1982, p. 229). In addition, the author mentioned several indications of discrimination, prejudice,
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by: Rebecca Skloot has a lot of themes, but one that is most relevant in my opinion is the racial politics of medicine. Throughout the chapters, there were examples of how Henrietta, being African American, prevented her from receiving the same treatment as the white woman sitting right next to her in the waiting room. The story begins with Henrietta going to Johns Hopkins Hospital and asking a physician to check a “knot on her womb.” Skloot describes that Henrietta had been having pain around that area for about a year, and talked about it with her family, but did not do anything until the pains got intolerable. The doctor near her house had checked if she had syphilis, but it came back negative, and he recommended her to go to John Hopkins, a known university hospital that was the only hospital in the area that would treat African American patients during the era of Jim Crow. It was a long commute, but they had no choice. Patient records detail some of her prior history and provide readers with background knowledge: Henrietta was one of ten siblings, having six or seven years of schooling, five children of her own, and a past of declining medical treatments. The odd thing was that she did not follow up on upcoming clinic visits. The tests discovered a purple lump on the cervix about the size of a nickel. Dr. Howard Jones took a sample around the tissue and sent it to the laboratory.
According to the Belmont Report (1979), justice is relevant to the selection of subjects of research at two levels: the social and the individual. Skloot (2010) describes how “Gey took any cells he could get his hands on” and how “TeLinde began collecting samples from any woman who walked into Hopkins with cervical cancer” (p. 30). These two doctors did not exhibit fairness in their selection of subjects. Dr. TeLinde was collecting samples from women on the color ward and did not consider the appropriateness of placing further burdens on already burdened persons. The women whose tissue samples are being gathered for research are the women who will most likely be the last to benefit; because more advantaged populations (wealthy and white) will initially be the primary
People trust doctors to save lives. Everyday millions of Americans swallow pills prescribed by doctors to alleviate painful symptoms of conditions they may have. Others entrust their lives to doctors, with full trust that the doctors have the patient’s best interests in mind. In cases such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, the Crownsville Hospital of the Negro Insane, and Joseph Mengele’s Research, doctors did not take care of the patients but instead focused on their self-interest. Rebecca Skloot, in her contemporary nonfiction novel The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, uses logos to reveal corruption in the medical field in order to protect individuals in the future.
Rebecca Skloot’s novel, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, depicts the violation of medical ethics from the patient and researcher perspectives specifically when race, poverty, and lack of medical education are factors. The novel takes place in the southern United States in 1951. Henrietta Lacks is born in a poor rural town, Clover, but eventually moves to urban Turner Station. She was diagnosed and treated for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins hospital where cells was unknowingly taken from her and used for scientific research. Rebecca Skloot describes this when she writes, “But first—though no one had told Henrietta that TeLinde was collecting sample or asked she wanted to be a donor—Wharton picked up a sharp knife and shaved two dime-sized pieces of tissue from Henrietta's cervix: one from her tumor, and one from the healthy cervical tissue nearby. Then he placed the samples in a glass dish” (33). The simple act of taking cells, which the physicians did not even think twice about, caused decades
Ethical violations committed on underprivileged populations first surfaced close to 50 years ago with the discovery of the Tuskegee project. The location, a small rural town in Arkansas, and the population, consisting of black males with syphilis, would become a startling example of research gone wrong. The participants of the study were denied the available treatment in order further the goal of the research, a clear violation of the Belmont Report principle of beneficence. This same problem faces researchers today who looking for an intervention in the vertical transmission of HIV in Africa, as there is an effective protocol in industrialized nations, yet they chose to use a placebo-contro...
The story about Henrietta Lacks is the evidence that the ethics of medical processes need to be improved. For a long time, many patients have been victims of malpractice. Sometimes, the doctors still can do anything without the agreement from patients. Any medical institution needs to hold the integrity on any consent form that is signed by a patient. To summarize, the story of Henrietta Lacks could be the way to improve the standardization and equality of medical institutions in the future.
In 1987, there was a Syphilis outbreak in a small town Alabama, Tuskegee. Ms. Evers went to seek out African Males that had this disease and did not. They were seeking treatment for this disease, but then the government ran out of money and the only way they can get treatment if they studied. They named this project “The Tuskegee Study of African American Man with Syphilis”, so they can find out where it originated and what will it do to them if go untreated for several months.
11) Washington, Harriet A. Medical apartheid: The dark history of medica experimentation on Black Americans from colonial times to the present. Random House LLC, 2006.
In looking at these instances, the doctors seemed to have thought their actions normal. They thought that since they were treating the patient they automatically had access to their cells, tissues, DNA, that they could take without permission and use to develop science or to even become rich and famous like Dr. Golde tried to do. One might say that no matter how useful a person's biological property can be to western medicine and science, it does not excuse the violation of privacy of a patient. Ostensibly, there is no need to worry about a patient saying no if the doctor has moral and beneficial intentions for the use of a patient's private, biological
Even though her cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human materials, her family never saw any of the profits from the industry. The book connects the dark history of experimentation on African Americans without consent to the birth of race issues on medical research and finally to the court battles over if we have control over our own bodies.
The main results that doctors were trying to obtain from this experiment was to gain information about how African Americans men’s bodies reacted to syphilis. During the 1930’s, society believed that black men were inferior to white men, so diseases were supposed to affect differently black men. This study in particular, the participants were not informed about the capacity that this disease could damage their human system and they were not viewed as a human being and they were used as lab rat. Furthermore, one of the doctors who were involved in this experiment Dr. Raymond Vonderlehr used the term “necropsy” that is an autopsy performed on animals when speaking about the participants of this experiment (Mananda R-G, 2012).
Not only did “accidental” sterilizations occur often, but also other organs or tissue and medical procedures would be performed on innocent Africans who went seeking help from the medical profession and were horribly treated and misused in the name of science. In 1977, Casper Yeagin, a sixty-eight-year-old retired mechanic, disappeared. His daughter filed a missing persons report and after months of worry and multiple errors on the police’s part, Casper’s body was found on a slab at Howard University medical school waiting to be used for practice by medical students. No one had seen anything wrong with finding a dead African American on the street and after the body had not been claimed (in less time than is normally given) so the body was sent to the Medical school to be used for research. The fact is that most of the bodies donated from the medical examiners office were of African descent, while the unclaimed Caucasian bodies were left to wait for just a bit longer to see if someone would come and recognize the cold, dead face.
What justifies a physician experimenting on another human being? Some researchers believe it is racial superiority. At the time that African Americans were viewed as lesser as whites, some institutions were
The purpose of this novel is to examine the significant tools of medicine that developed from one human being. The novel expresses life in the past involving the issue of slavery, racism, gaps in communication, poverty and suffering. It also explores the issue of ethics, particularly the topic of informed consent, within medical research and public health. Unfortunately very few people knew who Henrietta Lacks was, yet HeLa cells were omnipresent in the medical