There is a dark history of medical practices and experimentation by physicians and medical staff which was aimed at the Black population both during slavery and in the days of legalized Jim Crow and beyond. This medical abuse, ranged from outright torture, unethical experimentation, forced sterilization of black women, injecting germs into patients, bodysnatching for dissections, and to more recently “race norming” in pro-football. It also included racist myths about the thickness of black skin and tolerance of pain. Things have changed thanks to clinical trials and strict scrutiny of medical experiments, but no so back then.
In a March 2020 study, it found that U.S. birth rates of sickle cell disease and cystic fibrosis are 1 in 365 Black people and 1 in 2,500 white people, respectively. Sickle disease is 3 times more prevalent than cystic fibrosis, but federal funding from 2008 to 2018 supplied the same amounts to both. The severe undertreatment of Black patients’ pain has been connected to false beliefs. Unbelievably, in a 2016 study, half of a sample of 222 white medical students said they believed Black people have thicker skin than white people. Racism at work even today.
The past still binds us to racism and injustice in America, and in understanding how we got to where we are now it is imperative that we understand the psyche of racism. We know from history that black men and women were sold like animals and beasts of burden on the auction block. Black women were used as slaves and sex objects to service the needs of white men and their families, while black men were used as slaves to be worked to death and whipped or killed if they did not produce.
Even after death, black bodies were buried in black graveyards, dragged to rivers for the alligators, or chopped up for hogs to eat on the plantation. What is generally not known is that black corpses were stolen from graveyards and sold to medical schools so that white doctors could learn about human anatomy. The medical schools of Virginia, Pennsylvania, John Hopkins, North Carolina, and others all engaged in bodysnatching or graverobbing. After blacks died, were executed, or lynched their bodies were removed from the grave secretly and taken to medical schools for dissections so that white medical students could learn about the human body.
According to Dr. Berry’s research, black adult bodies were sold at Charlottesville medical school for twelve dollars, while “infants from birth to 8 years” sold for four dollars. Mothers and infant corpses were sold for fifteen dollars in the late 1700s and in the 1800s. The American hero, Nat Turner, who led a slave rebellion for freedom in 1831, was also mutilated after he was hung. He was beheaded and his skin was used to make a wallet(s). Nat Turner’s skull traveled across the country and was in the possession of various physicians for many years. Dr. Berry writes that immediately after his execution, “Witnesses note that Turner’s body was given to medical students (possibly from the University of Virginia or Winchester Medical School in Virginia) for dissection.” She goes on to report that, “A local doctor possessed his skeleton ‘for many years’; at some point, it was misplaced.” One man admitted to tanning the skin of Nat Turner and making it available to be seen in local shops. Several of the blacks that fought with John Brown at Harper’s Ferry, after their execution, were dug up from the cemetery and turned over to medical schools.
