User:Pinkblue04/Medical racism in the United States

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Along with unequal access to medical care, medical racism has contributed to violence perpetrated against black Americans throughout history. Including the use of "resurrectionists" to retrieve newly buried bodies of deceased black people for medical study use, the bodies of black people were abused for forced medical experimentation for many years. As noted in writings on the American medical field's history of medical racism, "American medical education relied on the theft, dissection, and display of bodies, many of whom were black." This is especially true for women, such as was the case for Henrietta Lacks. The nonconsensual experimentation on enslaved black women was used to help further the field of gynecology. Following this, due to the history of eugenics in the United States, this same population once again fell victim to forced procedures, in this case sterilization. This went on in the US as late as the 1970s and 1980s as is documented in Killing the Black Body. For black Americans, the involuntary sterilization of black women was so well known it began being referred to as the "Mississippi Appendectomy".

The violence which was perpetrated by American physicians and institutions has a long, documented history. Including the Tuskegee syphilis study, there are many other instances of experimentation on black populations without their knowledge or consent. In 1951, the US Army intentionally exposed large numbers of black citizens to Aspergillus fumigatus to ascertain whether they were more susceptible to this fungus. In the same year, black workers at a Norfolk supply center in Virginia were exposed to crates contaminated with the same fungus. Journalist Richard Sanders reported that from 1956 to 1958 the US Army intentionally released mosquitoes in poor black communities of Savannah, Georgia and Avon Park, Florida. Many people subsequently developed fevers for unknown reasons and some of them died, it is theorized that the mosquitoes were infected with a strain of yellow fever. Pulitzer-prize winning author of The Plutonium Files, Eileen Welsome wrote on how the US secretly injected thousands of Americans with plutonium while it was developing the atomic bomb. A number of these victims were black and they were completely unaware of the injections. '''White medical educators used African American patients to run trials for numerous procedures. They preferred to use African American patients over any other race.'''