Present to Past
Medical Racism
![A color photograph of a portion of a Stop Aids graffiti mural in New York City. The mural is painted on a light tan wall. The bottom half of the image features a depiction of a white brick wall with cracks running through many of the bricks, running the full length of the image. A light and dark blue cloud features prominently on the left side of the image with the words [STOP / AIDS] spray painted in yellow letters outlined in red. The middle of the image features an illustration two men standing in profile, facing each other, on either side of a tombstone. The front of the tombstone has the text [USE YOUR / HEAD BEFORE / YOU END UP / DEAD.] written in black text. The word [DEAD] is underlined and the letters have drip lines giving it a bloody text effect. The man on the left is featured wearing a yellow shirt, yellow pants, and black shoes with yellow laces. He has three black thought bubbles above, and to the right of his head. He is holding his proper left hand splayed out, reaching for a syringe with a bloody hypodermic needle in the proper right hand of the man depicted on the right of the tombstone. The man on the right is depicted with red spikey hair, a green shirt, green pants and black shoes with white laces. On the far right of the image is the text [THE LAW] written in red block letters, outlined in black, above a depiction of scrolled paper with the text [I. DON’T “SHOOT” / DRUGS. / II. USE CONDOM. / III. HAVE SEX WITH FAiTHFUL / PARTNER.] written in black text. There are no inscriptions on the recto. On the verso the image is signed in blue ink by the photographer.](/static/bc247fe92533cf2c8170cc1ed60d5da9/40176/2015_132_262_001.webp)
1850Scientific Racism and Medical Experimentation
19th Century Racist Depiction of Human Origins
Medical Experimentation on Enslaved Black Women
Douglass Speech Challenging Pseudoscience, 1854
J. Marion Sims, often referred to as the father of gynecology, conducted trial operations on enslaved Black women for several years without anesthesia. Enslaved women named Lucy, Anarcha, and Betsy are mentioned in his journals. After years of subjecting Black women to experimental operations without anesthesia, he successfully created a procedure to fix vesicovaginal fistula. He moved his practice to New York, where he performed this procedure on upper-middle class white women with anesthesia. Sims also studied trismus nascentium (infant lock jaw) and experimented on enslaved infants. He studied the disease by using a shoemaker's awl to pry the skull bones of Black infants into alignment. These were fatal procedures, but Sims blamed the fatalities on "the sloth and ignorance of their mothers and the black midwives who attended them."
False Findings of Louis Agassiz
Agassiz, Louis, 1807-1873
Racist, false beliefs about biological differences between the races were used to justify the enslavement and exploitation of Black people and informed the practice and research of much of 19th-century scientific thought.
Biologist Louis Agassiz espoused polygenism, the belief that the races developed separately and were of different origins. In his view, Black people were of the “lowest grade of humanity.” In 1850, Agassiz commissioned daguerreotypes of 15 enslaved men and women, including Renty Taylor and his daughter Delia, to prove Black inferiority.
African American doctors like James McCune Smith, the first African American to hold a medical degree, refuted racist pseudoscientific claims, as have generations of Black doctors, scientists, and medical professionals after him.