Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

Content Warning: The source material and this guide include discussions of racism, eugenics, and medical experimentation.

The major throughline in Medical Apartheid is how medical science has been characterized by the racist dehumanization of Black people. White doctors often fail to show the same compassion toward their Black patients as they do toward their white patients. Washington introduces this disparity in an anecdote in the Introduction, in which she stumbles upon the files of two different patients, one white and one Black. While the white patient was described compassionately, with the doctor describing his family personality, the Black patient was far less fully described, with the file frequently emphasizing that he was “Negro” (14). The differences extend beyond mere description into malpractice, as the white patient received a needed kidney transplant, but the Black person did not receive the organ donation they needed to survive. The extreme difference in the two files epitomizes a long-standing gap in the care received by white and Black medical patients, and it shows how viewing Black people as less human results in substandard care for Black patients.

Washington traces this dehumanization of Black patients back to slavery, which itself relied on the idea that Black people were less than human.