"Thoughtless of the future, and improvident to a degree, the negro stands constantly in need of counsel and advice, and he is ever ready to place himself under the guidance and instruction of the white man, the superiority of whose judgment and intellect he is always willing to acknowledge."
- A.P. Merrill, a Tennessee doctor, in the Southern Medical and Surgical Journal (1856)
By the 1800s, racism had pervaded every aspect of American society, including medicine. Distinguished medical journals began to promote the supremacy of Caucasians over African-Americans.
Excerpt by James Jones, author of "Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment," in the lecture "The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment: A Travesty of Race and Medicine"
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"A careful inspection reveals the body of the negro a mass of minor defects and imperfections from the crown of the head to the soles of the feet..." - Dr. W.T. English, in the New
York Medical Journal (1903) |
"It is difficult to find in a dissecting room a negro subject free from tubercular deposit. Another disease that I will only mention - syphilis - is frightfully common." - Hunter McGuire, President of the American Medical Association (1893)
Physicians believed that African-Americans were "more liable to hereditary diseases, especially tuberculosis and syphilis" for several reasons (Matas 1896).
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The article "Is the Black Race Doomed?" argues African-Americans are more prone to disease (State Historical Society of North Dakota 1911).
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"I have yet to see one [Negro] who would continue treatment for any venereal disease, either as a private patient in an out-door clinic, or a hospital, any longer than there was extreme discomfort to himself." - Dr. Henry McHatton, in American Journal of Dermatology (1906)
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"The negro springs from a southern race, and as such his sexual appetite is strong; all of his environments stimulate this appetite, and as a general rule his emotional type of religion certainly does not decrease it...the leading negro physicians of Washington admit that virginity is very rare among the poorer members of their race." - Dr. H.H. Hazen, in Journal of the
American Medical Association (1893) |
"The fact that [the African American man] is at the bottom of the economic ladder contributed to his abnormally high [syphilis] rate ... especially in the rural South, [the African American's] house is the most miserable, his clothing the scantiest, and his food ration the most poorly balanced" - Dr. Thomas Parran, in Shadow on the Land: Syphilis, the White Man's Burden (1937)
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