Profitable Wonders

Profitable Wonders Washington, H. (2008). Profitable wonders. From Medical Apartheid. New York: Harlem Moon. Many of the horrors of slavery, such as whipping and beating, are well-known to contemporary readers. However, according to Harriet Washington in her essay "Profitable wonders" from her book Medical Apartheid, there is an equally ugly yet less-publicized side of the American Southern plantation system, namely the use of black slaves in medical experimentation. Today, we think of medical experimentation on persons deemed to be of inferior races as something common in Nazi society, not our own.

However, as "Profitable wonders" makes clear, anytime a race is demonized, it is liable to be used in inhumane ways, much in the same way that animals are used in medical experimentation.

The disparities today between African-American's state of physical health and whites are often commented upon and the article makes clear that such inequities have its roots far, far back in the past: this odious brand of scientific racism is testimony to the fact that the fears African-Americans often express about modern medicine have clear roots in fact, not in a neurotic historical imagination.

The article makes gripping use of the narrative format, as well as presents historical data to support its contention that there was a consistent program of medical experimentation on African-Americans during the antebellum period. The article opens with an account of one 'John Brown,' a slave who was used by a certain 'Doctor Hamilton' to test cures the quack doctor wished to use on Brown's master. The treatments were more abuse than curative, with dubious medical legitimacy.

Not only were slaves used in experimentation, but they were valued so little because of their race that so-called scientists felt little compunction about subjecting them to experiments of almost no medical value. In the 19th century, there was no standard ethical protocol regarding the ethics of experimentation (Washington 2008: 55). "The experimental abuse of African-Americans was not a cultural anomaly; it simply mirrored…the economic, social and health abuses that the larger society perpetuated against people of color (Washington 2008: 56).

Slaves were considered ideal 'test subjects' on which to perform everything from experimental surgeries to test cures for malaria. Although Brown's personal account opens up the piece, accounts of whites who describe matter-of-factly their use of blacks as experimental subjects are also marshaled in support of this contention. In no less than a publication than the Southern Medical and Surgical Journal, over half the articles described experiments upon blacks, who were also overrepresented in medical and surgical wards, primarily because of their 'usefulness' in experimentation.

Often, procedures were performed without anesthesia. The logic of racism allowed a kind of perverse mental paradox -- on one hand, blacks were 'necessary' to use in experiments because they were human beings and were thus ideal to test out new remedies upon. On the other hand, they were also seen.