Medical Apartheid Summary

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Medical Apartheid Summary

Medical apartheid can be described as an unethical practice in medicine where blacks or the African Americans are largely used in the experimentation of drugs, and other forms of treatment. It also includes the withdrawal of quality healthcare access to this population, which is largely under the pretext that the blacks are the weaker and inferior race. The sixth chapter of the book, Freedom gives an account of medical apartheid history in America. The blacks were captured and sold into slavery from West Africa into the Americas. Naturally, this meant that according to the whites, they were an inferior race, which was supposed to be subservient to the white population. Slavery was rampant in the southern states, where the black population was increasing gradually. Medical scientists argued that the mulattos were a weak species, incapable of reproduction, and would soon die out, leaving the white population in America. The black people were therefore considered as a population that could not govern itself; hence, they needed to be enslaved. Enslavement translated to a myriad of negativity and adversity for the African American population. For instance, they were given limited access to health care, therefore, most of them suffered from mental health, tuberculosis, pneumonia, malaria, syphilis, among others. There were also high cases of infant mortality and miscarriages among the black women. The census conducted at the time revealed that free blacks in the northern states with mental illnesses were eleven times more those enslaved in the southern states.

These cases were fuelled by the state’s negligence and lack of concern for these inhabitants. Medical doctors provided case histories, which described the blacks as a community who were mostly starving after depleting their finances in alcohol, entertainment, buying clothes, and tobacco. This then increased their chances of acquiring tuberculosis. In addition to that, the black people were portrayed as violent, who could not resist the urge to engage in activities such as drinking alcohol, having indiscriminate sexual contact amongst themselves, among other vices. This, therefore, reinforced the government’s reason to use racial segregation as one of the methods of improving public health. Indeed, it is shocking to realize that the blacks were barred from accessing mental hospitals and other institution, in a bid to protect the public from the diseases. These methods are considered draconian by various scholars since they largely discriminated the African Americans. Evidently, the black population was blatantly denied access to medical care simply because they were not white, who were thus considered inferior and the weaker race.

Various diseases had been associated with various races and largely associated with the black population. Examples of these diseases include syphilis, pellagra, malaria, and cholera. Therefore, it was common to find a white man dying of a disease like cholera mostly because h loathed the fact that he had acquired a black man’s disease, and, therefore, the shame was too much to bear. This practice is absurd since the human body is the same despite the race. Human beings are prone to the same diseases, and they suffer the same symptoms. This is one of the best examples of medical apartheid outlined in the chapter. Another example of medical apartheid mentioned in the chapter is the falsification of medical records and data, with the aim of marginalizing the black people, which widened the gap between the whites and the colored in the society. This chapter is indeed revealing and enlightening of the medical apartheid in the United States in the previous centuries, much of which is still present in the hospitals.