Medical Experimentation on Slaves: Harriet Washington's Findings
This paper reviews Harriet Washington's essay "Profitable Wonders" from her book Medical Apartheid, which documents the systematic medical experimentation performed on enslaved Black Americans during the antebellum period. The review examines Washington's use of narrative and historical evidence—including the account of slave John Brown and data from the Southern Medical and Surgical Journal—to argue that scientific racism was institutionalized within the antebellum plantation system. The paper also considers Washington's broader claim that the racial health disparities and medical distrust present in African-American communities today have clear historical roots in this documented legacy of abuse.
- Introduction: Medical experimentation on slaves in antebellum America
- Narrative and Historical Evidence: Washington's use of narrative and documentary sources
- The Logic of Racism in Medical Experimentation: Racist paradox enabling abuse of enslaved subjects
- Blame, Pseudoscience, and Lasting Legacy: Historical blame patterns and modern racial health disparities
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper grounds its analysis in a specific primary text and traces Washington's argumentative strategy—narrative opening followed by documentary evidence—rather than simply summarizing plot.
- It uses direct quotation from Washington to support analytical claims, giving the reader concrete textual evidence alongside interpretation.
- The concluding observation connects historical findings to contemporary racial health disparities, demonstrating the writer's ability to synthesize a source's broader implications.
Key academic technique demonstrated
This paper demonstrates source-driven analytical writing: the student identifies and explains the rhetorical and argumentative moves Washington makes (narrative structure, data from medical journals, paradox of racist logic) rather than simply retelling the essay's content. This approach shows critical engagement rather than passive reading.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a contextualization of the topic and a thesis connecting historical experimentation to present-day distrust of medicine. It then analyzes Washington's use of narrative and historical evidence, examines the internal contradictions of racist medical logic, and closes by extending Washington's argument to contemporary racial health inequities. The structure moves logically from historical context to analytical interpretation to broader significance.
Introduction
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: the use of Black slaves in medical experimentation. Today, we tend to associate medical experimentation on persons deemed racially inferior with Nazi society, not our own. However, as Profitable Wonders makes clear, anytime a race is demonized, it becomes liable to be used in inhumane ways—much as animals are used in medical experimentation.
The disparities between African-Americans' state of physical health and that of whites are frequently commented upon, and the essay makes clear that such inequities have their roots far back in the past. This odious brand of scientific racism testifies to the fact that the fears African-Americans often express about modern medicine have clear roots in documented history, not in a neurotic historical imagination.
Narrative and Historical Evidence
The essay makes gripping use of the narrative format while also presenting historical data to support its contention that there was a consistent program of medical experimentation on African-Americans during the antebellum period. The essay opens with an account of one John Brown, a slave used by a certain Doctor Hamilton to test cures the unscrupulous doctor wished to use on Brown's master. The treatments were more abusive than curative, with dubious medical legitimacy. Not only were slaves subjected to experimentation, but they were so devalued because of their race that so-called scientists felt little compunction about subjecting them to experiments of almost no medical value.
Although Brown's personal account opens the piece, accounts by white experimenters who describe matter-of-factly their use of Black subjects are also marshaled in support of Washington's argument. In no less a publication than the Southern Medical and Surgical Journal, over half the articles described experiments performed upon Black subjects, who were also overrepresented in medical and surgical wards—primarily because of their perceived "usefulness" in experimentation. Often, procedures were performed without anesthesia.
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