x, 501 pages : 21 cm

The first comprehensive history of medical experimentation on African Americans. Starting with the earliest encounters between Africans and Western medical researchers and the racist pseudoscience that resulted, it details the way both slaves and freedmen were used in hospitals for experiments conducted without a hint of informed consent--a tradition that continues today within some black populations. It shows how the pseudoscience of eugenics and social Darwinism was used to justify experimental exploitation and shoddy medical treatment of blacks, and a view that they were biologically inferior, oversexed, and unfit for adult responsibilities. New details about the government's Tuskegee experiment are revealed, as are similar, less well-known medical atrocities conducted by the government, the armed forces, and private institutions. This book reveals the hidden underbelly of scientific research and makes possible, for the first time, an understanding of the roots of the African American health deficit.--From publisher description

Includes bibliographical references (pages 465-484) and index

Introduction: The American Janus of medicine and race -- pt. 1. A troubling tradition -- Southern discomfort: medical exploitation on the plantation -- Profitable wonders: antebellum medical experimentation with slaves and freedmen -- Circus Africanus: the popular display of Black bodies -- The surgical theater: Black bodies in the antebellum clinic -- The restless dead: anatomical dissection and display -- Diagnosis: freedom: the Civil War, Emancipation, and Fin de Siècle medical research -- "A notoriously syphilis-soaked race": what really happened at Tuskegee? -- pt. 2. The usual subjects -- The black stork: the eugenic control of African American reproduction -- Nuclear winter: radiation experiments on African Americans -- Caged subjects: research on Black prisoners -- The children's crusade: research targets young African Americans -- pt. 3. Race, technology, and medicine -- Genetic perdition: the rise of molecular bias -- Infection and inequity: illness as crime -- The machine age: African American martyrs to surgical technology -- Aberrant wars: American bioterrorism targets Blacks -- Epilogue: Medical research with blacks today

National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist for Nonfiction, 2007

Self-Renewing 2017

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