White Doctors With Black Hearts
What's at the root of medical discomfort and distrust among women and Black Americans? Part one of goodness knows.
Most women, no matter what they look like -or whatever identity their looks socially slot them into- know that if they go to get an Intrauterine Device (an IUD) they will most likely not be offered general anesthesia, given options on pain management during insertion, or adequately warned about the intensity and duration of possible pain they will feel during and after the procedure.
Is this because IUDs are scientifically known and proven to not cause much pain?
No.
Is this because the vast majority of people do not objectively need such assistance to endure the procedure?
No.
Is this because most women are biologically superpowered to handle deep pain and discomfort?
No.
They aren’t offered pain management options or warned because of a prevailing, convenient idea that has roots in our social history.
Over the centuries, various forms of the medical community have observed differences in bodies and then ascribed reasons, ideas, and myths about those differences. Why? Often times these imagined or fabricated reasons fit with their personal interpretations of the world, sacred texts like the Bible, or what they needed to be “true” for political, economic, and social gain.
It takes all of two minutes to realize that the history of America is many glorious, intriguing, problematic, and complicated things.
The history of America is the history of a democracy.
It’s also the history of a Patriarchy state.
All Patriarchy means is a social system in which positions of dominance and privilege are primarily held by men.
If one of your primary concerns as a culture and state for hundreds of years is to privilege the advancement, rights, pleasures, liberty, happiness, and economic, social, and political supremacy of men, the reality of women’s pain and discomfort must be deprioritized.
Generations of this kind of thinking are why even a cursory investigation into the experiences of women in our healthcare system reveals asymmetrical, gendered experiences of pain, dismissal, abuse, and outright negligence.
But wait!
We aren’t just dealing with the history and experiences of a state that was ordered around ideas of gender and male supremacy. The American state and the social institutions the law and culture built were ordered around ideas of race.
Harriet Washington, a brilliantly educated and hands-on researcher, scholar, lecturer, and author, has spent her life carefully sifting through more papers, research, and American history than most of us combined would ever get through. The breadth and depth of her knowledge is breathtaking.
She won the National Book Critics Award for a book called MEDICAL APARTHEID: THE DARK HISTORY OF MEDICAL EXPERIMENTATION ON BLACK AMERICANS FROM COLONIAL TIMES TO THE PRESENT.
Many of us are familiar with facts of the Tuskegee Syphilis experiment which is dramatic and haunting. Perhaps we understand there is a general mistrust between African Americans and the medical community at large. We see articles rise and fall about Black maternal health, the dearth of research on what common ailments look like on people of color, or that there are particular health issues in certain social communities. There is a general cloud of “issues” surrounding healthcare for women and especially Black women, but they seem to float unattached to any known history.
What are the origins of this discontent and why does it affect your healthcare today? Harriet Washington bravely answers in her writing. On this publication, on this platform, we will concisely go through the chapters (whether you read along at home or just get the gist here).
Chapter 1, Southern Discomfort, lays out a general context for making sense of the roots of the Black experience with the American Medical establishment. For now, the main, glaring takeaways to be explored in the next dispatches/posts:
1: Understanding where the American Medical community was in their understanding of diseases and treatment at the time enslaved people were captured, sold, and brought to America. What was typical of a doctor’s education back then? How did they train and for how long? How were people (considered White or Black) typically treated because of this particular training? What effect did that have when the “unholy trinity” of viruses hit the South? What was the relationship between doctors and herbal, chemical, and therapeutic treatment options?
2: What was typical of the enslaved medical culture? Two words for you: horrors abound. Washington introduces incentives and economic priorities that pervaded and undermined the doctor-patient relationship.
3. Spells out the different ideas of Race and how that affected treatment, scientific research, and general attitudes towards enslaved patients believed to be Black and the people who owned them who were believed to be White.
4. The political and economic needs of the day inspired science fiction to justify the treatment of women and enslaved people.
It’s fascinating, horrifying, and cuss word-inducing, but I love it when the fog begins to clear. I would bet everything I have to say that you as a reader either have an experience or know someone who will that is impacted by a story and a history you don’t know all that well. My best friend just told me that even the American Girl doll books have been banned from the Florida public school system. We started (and stopped) this publication with those books and the impact it has had on my life and my love of my country and place in it. Who we are, and what we experience, matters. This publication returns with a new commitment to “book club” through the authors and books that make sense of our shared experiences as it pertains to American history, race, and gender. I am deeply grateful for the people who give their lives to understanding these topics and translating them for our future.