What You Need To Know About Medical Racism with Harriet Washington
Black History Year
PushBlack
4.6 • 2.2K Ratings
🗓️ 25 December 2020
⏱️ 40 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Racism is a public health crisis. In the age of COVID-19, we've witnessed this firsthand as Black people perish at disproportionate rates - and it's not by coincidence. Medical ethicist and award-winning writer Harriet Washington illuminates the design of the systemic and medical racism at the root of it all. BHY is produced by PushBlack, the nation's largest non-profit Black media company - hit us up at BlackHistoryYear.com and share this with your people!
PushBlack exists because we saw we had to take this into our own hands. You make PushBlack happen with your contributions at https://BlackHistoryYear.com. Most people do 5 or 10 bucks a month, but everything makes a difference. Thanks for supporting the work.
The Black History Year production team includes Tareq Alani, Patrick Sanders, William Anderson, Jareyah Bradley, Brooke Brown, Shonda Buchanan, Eskedar Getahun, Leslie Taylor-Grover, Abeni Jones, Akua Tay, Darren Wallace and our producer, Cydney Smith. For Limina House, our producers are Jessica Rugh Frantz and Sasha Kai Parker, who also edits the podcast. Black History Year’s Executive Producers are Julian Walker for PushBlack and Mikel Ellcessor for Limina House.
Useful links:
"Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present" by Harriet Washington
"A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind" by Harriet Washington
"Carte Blanche: The Erosion of Medical Consent" by Harriet Washington
"Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century" by Dorothy Roberts
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | During his lifetime he'd been just another enslaved man. It's likely we would have |
| 0:09.9 | never known who he was except for for one fateful day, he slipped on a rock, broke his neck, and |
| 0:16.9 | drowned. |
| 0:18.7 | It was this accidental death, called it a turn of fortune, that secured him a permanent place in America's gross |
| 0:27.6 | history of operating on black bodies for medical experimentation. I'm Jay from Push Black, |
| 0:35.0 | and you're listening to Black History Year. Oh, And the Fortune was purchased with his wife and three children by a bone doctor in Waterbury, Connecticut in 1780s. Like most enslaved people, he lived a life filled with heavy labor and multiple farm injuries. |
| 1:20.0 | However, it's not his life that made medical history. |
| 1:24.0 | It's his death. |
| 1:26.0 | Fortune died during a critical time in medical history. |
| 1:30.0 | The study of medicine in the late 18th century was in transition from the barbaric medieval practices of purging, |
| 1:36.9 | bleeding, vomiting, and blistering to theories based on the empirical study of the body itself. |
| 1:46.0 | Medicine was becoming a professional reputable science, |
| 1:49.0 | and this new interest in the empirical study required bodies to dissect and examine. |
| 1:55.8 | Law prohibited dissection, though leading to a shortage in cadavers for students to study. |
| 2:01.7 | The solution for medical students was grim. They resorted to stealing dead bodies from graves. |
| 2:10.0 | Grave robbing got so bad that it led to riots. |
| 2:14.0 | Fortune's home state officially prohibited grave robbing for medical dissection in 1810, |
| 2:20.0 | but Fortune's death came too early. |
| 2:22.0 | This black man was denied the peace and sanctity of a permanent resting place. |
| 2:28.0 | Upon his death in 1798, the doctor who purchased him used his bones to study human anatomy. |
| 2:35.0 | But that wasn't the end of fortune's story. It gets worse. |
| 2:40.0 | Treated as property in life, in death, Fortune's bones became heirlooms for the doctor's family. |
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