ugandAshis 39 Medical Apartheid

UgandAshis 39

July 27, 2009

Fort Portal, Uganda

Medical Apartheid.

In the LINK to Fort Portal today I read 200 pages of Harriet A. Washington’s book Medical Apartheid: The dark history of medical experimentation on black Americans from colonial times to the present. (ISBN 978-0-7679-1547-2 and www.medicalapartheid.com) It is a lively book and after coming off the bus (reading with my headlamp as the bus had left 2 hours late) I was affected by its wealth of information and calm description of a long history of mistreatment of groups of people. In a way it reminds me of the book ‘Mismeasure of man’ by Stephen Jay Gould. It is sad to see how the powerful position that medical professionals have can be used against entire population groups.

Here are some topics the book addresses:
1. Imaginary black diseases as drapetomania (insane tendency to fleeing slavery), hebetude (laziness leading to mishandling the owners property), dysthesia Aethiopica (desire to destroy slave owners property), struma Africana (so called African TB), cachexia Africana (eating clay, earth, dust)

2. Polygenism or the belief in separately evolved species

3. Dr James Marion Sims who experimented on seventeen female slaves with genito-vesicular fistula without anesthesia despite it being available in the 1830’s to the 1840’s

4. The circus Africanus (showing a pygmy in the Bronx Zoo together with a gorilla and a orangutan and the St. Louis world exhibition as late as 1906 and 1910
)
5. The institutional grave robbing and body snatching for decades for the medical schools (1770-1973)

6. The Tuskagee Study where between 1932 and 1972 at least 399 were told they would be treated for syphilis but in fact where given no treatment to follow up their progress of disease

7. Mississippi appendectomy, an unnecessary surgical procedure leading to uterus amputation (and defacto sterilization) on healthy black and/or mentally challenged women. This was done on thousands of women in the USA until the seventies.

8. Injection of plutonium-239 to unknowing patients to test the most dangerous chemical we know. Done from 1945-1994 by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.

It makes me think about how medicine can be used to keep a certain power construct in place. Keep the people barefoot, knocked up and ill. It is a way to control people. Sad thing is that as we speak today vulnerable groups are being used for large scale experiments, testing new drugs in Africa and Asia (remember the Constant Gardener). I cannot wait to complete this book and just wanted to share a tip of the iceberg of problems this book addresses.

Namaskar,

Ashis