On Blackness & Medicine

Minorities, in fact, account for fewer than 10 percent of patients enrolled in clinical trials, according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities.

Taken from More Minorities Needed in Clinical Trials to Make Research Relevant to All • 2016 • News Article

Introducing the bent handle of the spoon I saw everything, as no man had ever seen before.

Taken from The story of my life • 1845 • Book

Pharmaceutical contract research is profitable to US physicians because of the fee-for-service payment system that structures companies' remuneration of PIs. Specifically, beginning with informed consent, PIs get paid for each step in the screening process, and for each study procedure, history and physical, and blood draw... An American College of Physicians' report found that contract research provides individual physicians income of up to US$300,000 annually.

Taken from United States Private-Sector Physicians and Pharmaceutical Contract Research: A Qualitative Study • 2012 • Research Study

More recently, to reduce public spending on poor, Black, and brown individuals, the government promoted long-acting reversible contraception (LARCs) despite shoddy evidence regarding side effects or potential complications, as Andrea Tone detailed in Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America

Taken from Racism in Medicine: As Doctors, We Must Do Better • 2019 • OpEd

...he set to work to ascertain how deep my black skin went. This he did by applying blisters to my hands, legs and feet, which bear the scars to this day. He continued until he drew up the dark skin from between the upper and the under one. He used to blister me at intervals of about two weeks. He also tried other experiments upon me, which I cannot dwell upon.

Taken from Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown • 1854 • Book

''In my field, we make morbid jokes about repealing the seat belt laws and air bag laws and gun-control laws,'' Dr. Jonathan Bromberg, director and chief surgeon of the organ transplant program at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan, said with a heavy sigh. ''I guess we're kind of the ghouls of medicine.''

Taken from Downside to Fewer Violent Deaths: Transplant Organ Shortage Grows • 2003 • News Article

The number of organ transplants performed on black Americans in 2015 was only 17% of the number of black Americans currently waiting for a transplant. The number of transplants performed on white Americans was 31% of the number currently waiting

Taken from Organ Donation and African Americans • 2015 • Government Website

The algorithms evaluate all the transplants possible among the patient-donor pool at once. Matches are made primarily on biological suitability, with the hardest-to-match patients getting first priority.

Taken from How AI changed organ donation in the US • 2018 • News Article

As Michele Goodwin notes, “based on trends of death, gang violence, drug culture, and a host of other social problems that seem more concentrated in urban environments, it is not unforeseeable that legislative consent would disproportionately affect people of color”

Taken from The Racially Unequal Impact of the US Organ Procurement System • 2014 • Medical Journal

Study 1 documented these beliefs among white laypersons and revealed that participants who more strongly endorsed false beliefs about biological differences reported lower pain ratings for a black (vs. white) target. Study 2 extended these findings to the medical context and found that half of a sample of white medical students and residents endorsed these beliefs. Moreover, participants who endorsed these beliefs rated the black (vs. white) patient’s pain as lower and made less accurate treatment recommendations... These findings suggest that individuals with at least some medical training hold and may use false beliefs about biological differences between blacks and whites to inform medical judgments, which may contribute to racial disparities in pain assessment and treatment.

Taken from Racial bias in pain assessment and treatment recommendations, and false beliefs about biological differences between blacks and whites • 2016 • Research Study

Health is politics by other means.

Taken from Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination • 2011 • Book

At a press conference in 1966, King stated, “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and the most inhumane because it often results in physical death.”

Taken from MLK, Justice and the Promise of a Healthier D.C. • 2019 • News Article

A 2016 Journal of Clinical Oncology study found that black women, regardless of their risk level, are less likely than white women to undergo genetic testing—in large part because physicians are less likely to recommend it to them.

Taken from This Is How the American Healthcare System Is Failing Black Women • 2018 • News Article

The number of negros employed in our factories will furnish materials for the support of an extensive hospital, and afford to the student that great desideratum–clinical instruction

Taken from Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present • 1840 • Book

Nor do many people suspect that corpses are precious raw material in a little-known profit-making industry, and that they are worth far more cut up than whole.

Taken from In Science's Name, Lucrative Trade in Body Parts • 2004 • News Article

A renowned eye bank has paid more than $1 million during the last five years to the Los Angeles County coroner's office in exchange for thousands of corneas, harvested without the permission or knowledge of the families of the dead.

Taken from Harvest of Corneas at Morgue Questioned • 1997 • News Article

Today, the legacy of this “post-mortem racism” survives in policies that continue to appropriate the bodies of “friendless paupers” such as the homeless–a disproportionate number of whom are black–for medical purposes.

Taken from Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present • 2006 • Book

This dataset contains our most up to date list of Unclaimed Persons found in Cook County.

Taken from Medical Examiner - Unclaimed Persons • 2019 • Dataset

New York is unique among American cities in the way it disposes of the dead it considers unclaimed: interment on a lonely island, off-limits to the public, by a crew of inmates

Taken from Unearthing the secrets of New York’s Mass Graves • 2016 • News Article

“Free Blood Test; Free Treatment, By County Health Department and Government Doctors,” the black and white signs said. “YOU MAY FEEL WELL AND STILL HAVE BAD BLOOD. COME AND BRING ALL YOUR FAMILY.”

Taken from ‘You’ve got bad blood’: The horror of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment • 2017 • News Article

Had I wealth, I’d burn it all; Not one cent for the Red Cross call. Our money is good … our blood is bad. But, still that shouldn’t make us mad. Are they afraid they’ll all turn black? Is that why our blood they lack? Their skins are white as snow … it’s well. Their souls are tarnished, black as hell.

Taken from Desegregating blood: A civil rights struggle to remember • 1942 • News Article

Blood donors of African descent are more likely to have proteins on their red blood cells that are similar to proteins on the red cell membrane of sickle cell patients who are also of African descent. Receiving that blood makes those patients less likely to develop reactions against those donated blood cells. “It’s very important. It’s my life,” Walton said of getting more African-Americans to donate blood... “For that blood to (not) be there when I need it and for it to not be as effective is upsetting.”

Taken from Many African-Americans don't trust hospitals and won't give blood. One Chicago doctor is out to change that. • 2019 • News Article

Late in 1941, the surgeons general of the United States Army and Navy informed the Red Cross that only blood from white donors would be accepted for military use... In January 1942, the War Department revised its position, agreeing to accept blood from black donors, though also insisting on rigid adherence to segregation of the blood supply.

Taken from The Civil Rights Movement and the Blood Supply • 2014 • Blog

When medical students were finished with the cadavers, Baker dumped the bones in a well, where they remained largely forgotten until 1994. The "limb pit" was discovered by a crew digging 25 feet below East Marshall Street during construction of a new medical sciences building.

Taken from Confronting the story of bones discarded in an old MCV well • 2011 • News Article

As photography became more accessible in the 1880’s, medical students across America began posing for group portraits in front of their cadavers. Through the 1920’s, this genre of medical photography became a quasi-ritual... To me the most fascinating stylistic attribute is the phrases students would write in chalk on dissection table.

Taken from Dissection table writings • 2014 • Blog

An estimated 10,000 bones were recovered from the basement of the Old Medical College Building during excavations in 1989. These disarticulated bones were dispersed among old medical tools and trash from the lab... most of the remains belonged to African Americans.

Taken from Bodies in the Basement: The Forgotten Stolen Bones of America’s Medical Schools • 2015 • News Article

...the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) created an “exception from informed consent” (EFIC) pathway for trials conducted on people incapacitated by life-threatening conditions... Nearly one-third of US patients in EFIC trials were African American.

Taken from A Systematic Review Of The Food And Drug Administration’s ‘Exception From Informed Consent’ Pathway • 2018 • News Article

...such an understanding of informed consent is premised largely on the autonomous individual and his or her rights, with little or no conception of the social aspects. This approach tends to reify the process of consent by stripping it away from its context and reducing it to a rational‐choice model of action.

Taken from Empty ethics: the problem with informed consent • 2003 • Research Study