3 Scientific and Medical Racism
Throughout the past several centuries, the correlation between race and biology has had profound and devastating effects on Africans living beyond the continent of Africa.
One scholar explains:
“The Western concept of race, although socially constructed, was always rooted in ‘biological’ features; that is, the characteristics used to classify individuals into races were always assumed to have a basis nontrivially rooted in human biology…Many scientists have been satisfied to use false statistics, poor methodology, and illogical conclusions to “prove” the theory that biology is a predictor of culture, without regard for real evidence stating the opposite…Therefore, rather than being based solely in objective observation, scientific racism is a scientific tradition in which biology is used not only to prove the existence of race, but also, to maintain existing social hierarchies.”[1]
Scientific Racism
Scientific racism is an ideology that appropriates the methods and legitimacy of science to argue for the superiority of white Europeans and the inferiority of non-white people whose social and economic status have been historically marginalized[2].
Scientific racism employed pseudoscientific beliefs and reasoning that were readily embraced by those who subscribed to ideologies of White supremacy and the perceived inferiority of Black and Native American people. Scientific racism drew support from contemporary xenophobia, antisemitism, sexism, colonialism, and imperialism, as well as justifications for slavery, particularly in the United States.2
Phrenology and eugenics are manifestations of scientific racism that were widely adopted and practiced in the United States, and both have had lasting impacts on generations to follow.
Phrenology
Phrenology is the study of the conformation of the skull as indicative of mental faculties and traits of character.
Phrenology was a pseudoscience first introduced in the early 1800s by the German physician Franz Joseph Gall, who proposed that the brain was composed of many distinct organs, each corresponding to specific traits and abilities. Gall theorized that because the human skull was shaped by the brain, its form could reveal significant information about brain functions and an individual’s mental capacity. By studying the skull’s shape, size, and contours, he believed one could determine intellectual and psychological traits. Despite the flawed logic of this hypothesis, phrenology gained popularity and eventually spread to the United States.
In Philadelphia, physician Samuel G. Morton employed phrenology to support his belief in racial differences. Morton advocated for polygenism, the theory that different races originated separately, and he framed racial differences as a divinely ordained natural phenomenon. Using phrenology, Morton sought to validate his beliefs by collecting nearly 1,200 skulls between 1830 and 1851.
Morton measured skull volume by filling them with peppercorns or lead pellets, then correlating volume with brain size. He argued that the race with the largest brain was the most intelligent. In his 1839 publication Crania Americana, Morton documented skull configurations and the supposed mental capacities of different races. According to his measurements, White Europeans had the largest brains, while people of African descent had the smallest.
As phrenology gained popularity in the United States, it was also used to reinforce the belief that Africans were mentally incompetent and inherently inferior. Morton’s claim that the skulls of Africans resembled those of primates further dehumanized Africans and their descendants in the United States, as many adopted this idea as justification for slavery and the mistreatment of enslaved people. Physician Charles Caldwell studied the skulls of various groups and concluded that the skulls of African people were destined to require a master and that they were best suited to servitude. Numerous so-called “race scientists” attempted to prove that Africans (Black people) and White people were not the same species and that Africans were therefore inferior. This idea gave rise to the concept of scientific racism, in which pseudoscientific methods were used to claim White biological superiority and to promote anti-Black racism.
- https://pages.vassar.edu/realarchaeology/2017/03/05/phrenology-and-scientific-racism-in-the-19th-century/
- https://understandingrace.org/history/science/one-race-of-several-species-1770-1850/
- https://www.science.org/content/article/racist-scientist-built-collection-human-skulls-should-we-still-study-them
- https://library.harvard.edu/confronting-anti-black-racism/scientific-racism
Eugenics
Eugenics is the scientifically erroneous and immoral theory of “racial improvement” and “planned breeding” which gained popularity during the early twentieth century. Eugenicists worldwide believed that they could perfect human beings and eliminate so-called social ills through genetics and heredity. They believed the use of methods such as involuntary sterilization, segregation, and social exclusion would rid society of individuals deemed by them to be unfit.[3]
Forced Sterilizations
Francis Galton, an English demographer, ethnologist, and cousin of Charles Darwin, coined the term “eugenics” in 1883.[4] Like other eugenicists, Galton’s beliefs were fueled by a flawed interpretation of Mendelian genetics, which asserted that human qualities such as intelligence, social behaviors, and complex diseases were inheritable. Eugenicists sought to “perfect” humanity by eliminating those they deemed unfit, including ethnic and religious minorities, people with disabilities, the urban poor, and LGBTQ individuals[5].
Supporters of eugenics believed there were two main threats to the American gene pool: those migrating into the United States and those already present within the country. Their solution was eugenic sterilization, in which individuals deemed unfit were institutionalized, sterilized, and then released back into society, unable to reproduce. Those designated as “unfit” were often labeled “feebleminded” or of lesser intelligence. Proponents argued that so-called feebleminded individuals were reproducing more quickly and therefore populating society with more of the same. The term “feebleminded” was broad and subjective, encompassing people who were disliked, considered moronic or imbecilic, women perceived as overly interested in sex, and others who did not conform to social expectations. In 1907, Indiana passed the first eugenic sterilization law in the United States, and other states soon adopted similar legislation. America attempted to “breed out” traits that were considered undesirable in order to create a population more acceptable to the predominantly White Society. Sterilizations were carried out on anyone deemed feebleminded or less desirable. Those subjected to forced sterilization included people of all races, particularly individuals with psychiatric illnesses, those who were incarcerated, people with disabilities of any kind, and those labeled sexually deviant. The U.S. eugenics movement was so influential that it caught the attention of Adolf Hitler, who rose to power in Germany and subjected millions to torture, sterilization, and death in his attempt to create a so-called “Master Race.”
German readers still closely followed American eugenic accomplishments as the model: biological courts, forced sterilization, detention for the socially inadequate, debates on euthanasia. As America’s elite were describing the socially worthless and the ancestrally unfit as “bacteria,” “vermin,” “mongrels” and “subhuman”, a superior race of Nordics was increasingly seen as the answer to the globe’s eugenic problems. US laws, eugenic investigations, and ideology became blueprints for Germany’s rising tide of race biologists and race-based hatemongers.[6]
Additional References:
The Supreme Court Ruling that Led to 70,000 Forced Sterilizations
The Horrifying American Roots of Nazi Eugenics
The Relf Sisters
The Relf sisters were sterilized without their knowledge or consent. They were targeted for sterilization because they were “poor, black, and living in public housing”. Here is their story.
Medical Racism
Medical racism is the systematic and widespread racism against people of color within the medical system. It encompasses the structural racism in society that contributes to poorer health outcomes for Black people, the racial disparities in access to health coverage, and the biases held by healthcare workers that affect the care provided to people of color in their care.[7]
Throughout the Antebellum South, medical journals often provided advice to slaveholders on managing enslaved people. These journals published pro-slavery commentary and promoted false medical theories that claimed to “prove” the inferiority of Black people. Such beliefs included labeling Black people as:
- Lazy
- Non-compliant
- Not Intelligent
- Culturally Unevolved
- Hypersexual (especially black women)
- Violent
- Insensitive to pain
Samuel Cartwright’s Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race
As chairman of a Louisiana State Medical Association committee, physician Samuel Cartwright was widely regarded as a medical authority. On March 17, 1851, he presented a paper entitled: “Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race” in which he described two conditions unique to African Americans:
- Drapetomania – a disease that causes slaves to run away
- Dysesthesia Aethiopica – a disease-causing “rascality” seen in slaves, but most often in freed slaves
Cartwright likened these so-called “diseases” to mental illness, suggesting that it was inconceivable for an enslaved person to oppose being in subjection. He also argued Black people had smaller brains and were created to be servile, assertions already familiar to those who studied phrenology. According to Cartwright, White people had the divine right to practice slavery, and any enslaved person who resisted was both mentally ill and in opposition to the will of God. Thus, any enslaved person who attempted to run away was, in his view, rejecting God’s will.
Cartwright further advised slaveholders to avoid becoming too familiar with enslaved people and to reject any notion of their equality. He insisted that the “Almighty” had declared them submissive and that these supposed “illnesses” could be entirely resolved by keeping the enslaved in strict subordination to their masters. In his writing, Cartwright claimed that drapetomania was brought on by:
- Trying to make the negro anything else than “the submissive knee-bender”
- Trying to raise him to a level with himself, or by putting himself on an equality with the negro
Cartwright wrote: “if any one of more of them, at any time, are inclined to raise their heads to a level with their master or overseer, humanity and their own good require that they should be punished until they fall into that submissive state which it was intended for them to occupy in all after-time.” The prescribed “cures” for these supposed diseases included beatings and toe amputations. These counterproductive means of control enacted by slaveowners perpetuated a cruel cycle of abuse and dehumanization that served as justification for continuing slavery.
Cartwright’s paper gained wider attention after its publication in the monthly DeBow’s Review, a widely circulated agricultural, commercial, and industrial magazine in the South that was known for “recommending the best practices for wringing profits from slaves.” His claims were readily accepted by those already predisposed to believe in Black inferiority. [8]
Read the text of Cartwright’s Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race
Ibram X. Kendi summed up the irony and absurdity of Cartwright’s new diseases when he penned: “Resisting Africans were nearly always cast as violent criminals, not people reacting to enslavers’ regular brutality, or pressing for the most basic human desire: freedom.”
― Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America
In the 19th century, the bodies of enslaved Black people were exploited for the advancement of American medical education. Medical schools relied on their bodies as “anatomical material” and even recruited students in Southern states by advertising this abundance. The development of U.S. medical education was built, in part, on the theft, dissection, and display of human remains, many of which belonged to Black people.[9]
James Marion Sims, a former president of both the American Medical Association and the American Gynecological Society, became known as the father of modern gynecology. Sims pioneered a surgical technique to repair vesicovaginal fistula, a complication of childbirth that caused constant pain and urine leakage. His practice relied heavily on enslaved women, on whom he performed repeated operations without anesthesia. As enslaved people, they could neither refuse experimentation nor give consent. Because slavery was legally sanctioned at the time, his methods were not regarded as controversial or inhumane. Enslaved women were considered property and treated accordingly.[10]
The first woman Sims operated on was 18-year-old Lucy, who had given birth a few months earlier and had been unable to control her bladder since. During the procedure, patients were stripped naked and positioned on their knees, leaning forward onto their elbows so that their heads rested on their hands. Lucy endured an hour-long surgery, screaming and crying in pain, while nearly a dozen doctors looked on. Sims later wrote, “Lucy’s agony was extreme.” She became gravely ill from his controversial use of a sponge to drain urine from the bladder, which caused blood poisoning. “I thought she was going to die… It took Lucy two or three months to recover entirely from the effects of the operation,” he wrote.[11]
Sims’s surgeries were unsuccessful for quite some time. He is said to have performed as many as 30 operations on a single 17-year-old enslaved woman named Anarcha, who had endured a traumatic labor and delivery. Once he “perfected” his method, Sims began performing the procedure on White women, this time using anesthesia. Although anesthesia was relatively new to the medical field and many physicians were hesitant to adopt it, Sims’s choice was deliberate. He refused to use it on enslaved women while testing and refining his technique, yet he intentionally employed it to spare White women pain during the same surgery.
Sims justified his refusal to use anesthesia or analgesics on Black women with the false belief that they did not experience pain in the same way as White people. When any of his patients died, he deflected responsibility by blaming “the sloth and ignorance of their mothers and the Black midwives who attended them.” To Sims, these women were not patients but tools, objects through which he honed his craft and means by which he sought to reduce the suffering of White women.[12]
Although some of his White colleagues openly objected to his techniques, none ever intervened to stop him. As one scholar observed, “we humans are as quick to embrace and decry distant examples of injustice and cruelty as we are to ignore ongoing, immediate instances of it.”[13]
The Father of Gynecology
Radiation Experiments
University of Cincinnati Radiation Experiments
Between 1960 and 1972, Eugene Saenger, a cancer researcher at the University of Cincinnati, conducted Department of Defense–funded full-body human radiation experiments to study the effects of radiation on the human body. The majority of the subjects were low-income Black cancer patients.
A Shameful System of Research
In 1958, Eugene Saenger, a cancer researcher at the University of Cincinnati School of Medicine, submitted a proposal to the Department of Defense (DOD) for a study on the effects of total body radiation (TBI) on patients with cancer. Two years later, Saenger began one of the most notorious human radiation experiments of the postwar era.
The founder of the nuclear medicine program at UC, Dr. Eugene Saenger, was responsible for these experiments and used means of finding subjects and collecting data considered unethical today. Examples of these unethical means include coaxing and manipulating patients into participation and leading them into believing that the radiation treatments were intended to treat their cancer. Test subjects and their families were deliberately left uninformed of the real goal of the study. These subjects were exposed to a potentially lethal amount of radiation which resulted in the death of all but one of the 90 subjects. Not only did adults endure these painful radiation experiments, but children as young as nine were also test subjects.
Individuals were intentionally exposed to a significant amount of radioactive Cobalt-60 within hours at doses that are comparable to 15,000 – 20,000 chest X-rays. It is not surprising that 25% of them died within the first 2 months, while 75% died within the first year.
Advisory groups repeatedly expressed concern about the scientific merits of the program, its clinical goals, and its procedures for informed consent, yet the study continued unimpeded until bad publicity finally shut it down in 1972.
After a legal settlement with the families of survivors in the 1990s, the University of Cincinnati erected a plaque listing the names of study victims. However, the placement of the memorial is problematic. Situated behind a parking garage and next to a dumpster, the plaque is difficult to find and view. Even when located, it offers only a list of names, providing little context about the experiments or the harm they caused.
Listen to more on the experiments conducted by Saenger.
“Cold War Radiation Test on Humans To Undergo a Congressional Review”
“In the hottest days of the cold war, when both East and West were planning for the worst, the American military had a frighteningly practical question: in the event of a nuclear explosion, how much radiation could a soldier withstand before becoming disoriented or disabled?
The Pentagon turned to the University of Cincinnati for answers. There, from 1960 to 1971, an eminent radiologist, Dr. Eugene L. Saenger, and his colleagues conducted experiments on 88 cancer patients, ages 9 to 84, exposing them to intense doses of radiation and recording their physical and mental responses. All but one of the patients were terminally ill and, with the exception of that young woman, have been dead for years.Most were poor; 60 percent were black.”[14]
The digitized version of an article from The New York Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.
- Garrod, Joel Z. "A brave old world: an analysis of scientific racism and BiDil®." McGill Journal of Medicine: MJM 9.1 (2006): 54. ↵
- Eugenics and scientific racism. In: Genome.gov. https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/Eugenics-and-Scientific-Racism. Accessed 7 Oct 2024 ↵
- https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/Eugenics-and-Scientific-Racism ↵
- National Human Genome Research Institute. “Eugenics and Scientific Racism.” National Human Genome Research Institute, 18 May 2022, www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/Eugenics-and-Scientific-Racism. Accessed 30 Oct. 2024. ↵
- https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/educational-resources/timelines/eugenics ↵
- https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/feb/06/race.usa ↵
- Bronson BE (2020) What is medical racism? In: YWCA Seattle | King | Snohomish. https://www.ywcaworks.org/blogs/firesteel/what-medical-racism. Accessed 7 Oct 2024 ↵
- https://www.phillytrib.com/commentary/drapetomania-compliant-blacks-sane-resisting-blacks-insane/article_0087a2d0-1acb-5364-870c-1205212e0a13.html ↵
- Reckoning with the histories of medical racism and violence in the USA ↵
- The Father of Modern Gynecology Performed Shocking Experiments on Enslaved Women ↵
- The James Marion Sims Problem ↵
- How Lucy, Betsey, and Anarcha Became the Foremothers of Gynecology ↵
- https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/james-marion-sims-problem-how-doctors-can-avoid-whitewashing-medicine-ncna880816 ↵
- https://www.nytimes.com/1994/04/11/us/cold-war-radiation-test-on-humans-to-undergo-a-congressional-review.html?unlocked_article_code=YxGQgy8CAR3L1RrHnDf5W6IZgfHfto0lUxjEBI7Wv7xn8oYnxX4JhRK1nEVevmZ63_MQLR6G7ftgaFAJLKarzNN_PQxEIRJexK0RS7RVp9BQOzko3SG84tLTRqORwOJvX9PqpO8JjfJoDzoHJhj_Vr6DeblnEIQzzPhVZi_VyyMl-RKYMtH4s2ZV3FT91HXLkQ4BdLCUMVJsbx7qkSuzz1v2zqu-pbfv4Y-HGOaZhtU4IxP562GVH5Ch9KERsKnnp6_cwq-EO8g01Bi27cEmgPufOBSY7i584eL9KlFF9pgX0JoXFYs0Y1v4UWdK_6eLwlJdZXZCnRdMJ2Vs1qpz0_uVmk_4yC7ITR6mCLqVmgiKg4hDV6h_2uExGqy8Yl0J8A5jPCBPZW2d&giftCopy=2_Explore&smid=url-share ↵
An ideology that appropriates the methods and legitimacy of science to argue for the superiority of white Europeans and the inferiority of non-white people whose social and economic status have been historically marginalized
The study of the conformation of the skull as indicative of mental faculties and traits of character
The scientifically erroneous and immoral theory of “racial improvement” and “planned breeding,” which gained popularity during the early 20th century. Eugenicists worldwide believed that they could perfect human beings and eliminate so-called social ills through genetics and heredity
The systematic and wide-spread racism against people of color within the medical system. It includes both the racism in our society that makes Black people less healthy, the disparity in health coverage by race, and the biases held by healthcare workers against people of color in their care
Discovered and named by physician and slaveowner, Samuel Cartwright as a a disease that causes slaves to run away.
Discovered and named by physician and slaveowner, Samuel Cartwright as a disease-causing "rascality" in free black people
