Starred Review. This groundbreaking study documents that the infamous Tuskegee experiments, in which black syphilitic men were studied but not treated, was simply the most publicized in a long, and continuing, history of the American medical establishment using African-Americans as unwitting or unwilling human guinea pigs. Washington, a journalist and bioethicist who has worked at Harvard Medical School and Tuskegee University, has accumulated a wealth of documentation, beginning with Thomas Jefferson exposing hundreds of slaves to an untried smallpox vaccine before using it on whites, to the 1990s, when the New York State Psychiatric Institute and Columbia University ran drug experiments on African-American and black Dominican boys to determine a genetic predisposition for "disruptive behavior." Washington is a great storyteller, and in addition to giving us an abundance of information on "scientific racism," the book, even at its most distressing, is compulsively readable. It covers a wide range of topics—the history of hospitals not charging black patients so that, after death, their bodies could be used for anatomy classes; the exhaustive research done on black prisoners throughout the 20th century—and paints a powerful and disturbing portrait of medicine, race, sex and the abuse of power.
(Dec. 26) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Owner Reviews, Ratings, Comments and Criticism
The opening salvo was the press reporting on the so called Tuskegee experiments, in which black syphilitic men were studied but not treated. This book gives the most complete description of the Tuskegee experiments I've seen as it makes this study the centerpiece of medical experimentation where one race was selectied out as the subjects.
From there, unfortunagely, it goes on to show that this was not an abberation but a practice that goes back to slave days. It gives the stories of experiment after experiment that were conducted the same way with predominately black subjects.
The book concentrates on experiments conducted on black Americans and goes on to describe the ongoing, perhaps everlasting suspicion that these experiments have left in the minds of black America towards the medical profession.
This is a fitting subject for a book, but while reading I was reminded of the other famous medical experimentation incidents such as the German experiments in their concentration camps or those performed by Japan's Unit 516. It seems that 'unter-people' or people viewed as some kind of sub-human are the favorites for experiments.
