Medical Experiments on Slaves...

5fish

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Central Florida
I found this unhappy history of American medicine... Doctors used slaves in their medical experiments before the civil war. We see again slavery corrupting influence was everywhere...

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/articl...xperiments-on-slaves-were-widespread-in-the-a

Electric shocks, brain surgery, amputations — these are just some of the medical experiments widely performed on American slaves in the mid-1800s, according to a new survey of medical journals published before the Civil War.

Previous work by historians had uncovered a handful of rogue physicians conducting medical experiments on slaves. But the new report, published in the latest issue of the journal Endeavour, suggests that a widespread network of medical colleges and doctors across the American South carried out and published slave experiments for decades.

Here:

The physician and slave owner William Aiken of Winnsboro, North Carolina, reported an 1852 experiment on a slave named Lucinda, who suffered from a bony growth around her right eye. Aiken and other doctors disfigured her by boring holes in her head — without chloroform, a gas that was used at the time for anesthesia — to remove the growth.

Here: Sim did not use any with the Slaves he experiment on and remember they are slaves do they really have free will... The paragraph below is to nice to Doc. Sims...

https://www.history.com/news/the-fa...logy-performed-shocking-experiments-on-slaves

The South Carolinian physician J. Marion Sims, often referred to as the "Father of Gynecology," developed a surgery for complications of childbirth on slave women in the 1840s. (Long seen as a villain, more recent historical research has suggested that some women willingly participated in Sims' surgeries, making him a more ambiguous figure.) Many surgical techniques — including amputations and experiments using ether as anesthesia — were tested on slaves before they made their way into standard medicine.

Here:

Although historians are only beginning to explore widespread experimentation on slaves and grave robbing, Kenny added, the findings won't surprise black communities near the sites of medical hospitals. Folklore of "Night Doctors" who robbed graves, or "Black Bottle Men" who poisoned patients to dissect them, is more than a century old, he said, and likely springs from the era of these cruel experiments.

Here is more on Sims which is more true to his story and slavery...

But because Sims’ research was conducted on enslaved black women without anesthesia, medical ethicists, historians and others have called for those monuments to be removed—or for them to be reconfigured as tributes to the enslaved women known to have endured his experiments.

Here:

Sims’s defenders say the Southern-born slaveholder was simply a man of his time for whom the end justified the means—and that enslaved women with fistulas were likely to have wanted the treatment badly enough that they would have agreed to take part in his experiments. But history hasn’t recorded their voices, and consent from their owners, who had a strong financial interest in their recovery, was the only legal requirement of the time.

Here Children:

Writer and medical ethicist Harriet Washington says Sims’s racist beliefs affected more than his gynecological experiments. Before and after his gynecological experiments, he also tested surgical treatments on enslaved black children in an effort to treat “trismus nascentium” (neonatal tetanus)—with little to no success. Sims also believed that African Americans were less intelligent than white people, and thought it was because their skulls grew too quickly around their brain. He would operate on African-American children using a shoemaker’s tool to pry their bones apart and loosen their skulls.

The link above has more about DR. Sims actions...
 
Here even another more powerful tale...

https://www.iflscience.com/health-a...inely-sold-specimens-ambitious-white-doctors/

Savitt argued that African Americans were easy targets for ambitious and entrepreneurial white physicians in the slave south. Slaves, as human commodities, were readily transformed into a medical resource, easily accessible as empirical test subjects, “voiceless” and rendered “medically incompetent” through the combined power and authority of the enslaver and their employee, the white physician. Savitt suggested that “outright experimentation upon living humans may have occurred more openly and perhaps more often owing to the nature of slave society,” and also that “the situation may have been (and probably was) worse in the Deep South.”

Another horror of Slavery

https://www.iflscience.com/health-a...inely-sold-specimens-ambitious-white-doctors/

Here:

When an elite white enslaver-physician, Charlestonian Elias S. Bennett, published notes recalling the case of a truly extraordinary tumour afflicting a young female slave on the family’s James Island plantation, his narrative revealed much about the opportunities for human subject research under American slavery. ( You need to read the story ends badly for the girl)

Here:

White doctors, including those in remote rural locations, routinely sent reports of experiments on slave subjects to medical journals and trafficked black bodies to medical colleges. Medical museums openly solicited black body parts and medical societies relied on black bodies. Students too wrote graduating theses based on the medical manipulation of black “subjects” and “specimens”.

Here:

Slaves were generally unable to prevent treatments chosen by their owners and physicians could take enormous risks with the lives of these patients. Those risks were all the greater when doctors were also the owners of the enslaved patients. The opportunities presented by the system of chattel slavery meant that white doctors had at hand an easily accessible population upon which they could execute experimental research programs and develop new tools, techniques and medicines.

Read the link and the Horror stories...
 
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Dr. Sims statue... in New York City... it was moved next to his grave...

This morning, a bronze monument of J. Marion Sims—a gynecologist who experimented on female slaves without anesthesia or consent in the late 1800s—was taken down from Central Park and will be relocated to the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. A modest crowd of press, advocates, and doctors clustered a few feet from the monument as reps from the New York City Public Design Commission pulled the statue down and transferred it onto a flatbed truck.

Link: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/...xperimented-on-slaves-moved-from-central-park
 
Here is another Doctor McDowell, who experimented on slave women...

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/father-abdominal-surgery-practiced-enslaved-women-180967589/

Sims, however, wasn’t the only doctor who used enslaved women as operative test cases for developing procedures, and he’s not the only one commemorated by a statue in an important place. A bronze model of Kentucky doctor Ephraim McDowell, known as the “father of abdominal surgery,” stands in the United States Capitol Visitor’s Center, a part of the esteemed National Statuary Hall Collection. It goes without saying that no memorial exists to the four enslaved women he operated on as he developed a surgical treatment for ovarian cancer.

Here:

Between 1809 and 1818, McDowell wrote about having conducted five separate ovariotomies, including Crawford. The remaining four were all performed on enslaved women, making him–like Sims–a link in a chain of gynecological experiments performed without consent.

Here:

In the same 1817 article where he wrote about Crawford’s surgery, McDowell described two of those surgeries: in the first, an unnamed enslaved woman with “a hard and very painful tumor in the abdomen,” he actually didn’t think performing surgery was a great idea. “The earnest solicitation of her master and her own distressful condition” made him agree to try it.

Here:

Black women–like enslaved laborers more generally–were frequently the subjects of medical experiments, because they were “convenient,” she says. Unlike white women such as Crawford, who clearly gave consent to the procedure, to operate on an enslaved woman, all that was needed was the permission of her owner. Whether they also consented to the procedure is “almost beside the point,” Washington says. “That’s because of the nature of enslavement.” The enslaved women weren’t capable of saying a free “yes” or “no,” because, quite simply, they weren’t free.

The story goes on about the other slave women he seemed to be a little bit more humane than seems. He too is/ was considered a hero until resent times. McDowell house is a museum to him but there is nowhere in the museum does it mention his experiments on slave women... The link tells more of his story and the advancement of women medicine...
 
Aiken and other doctors disfigured her by boring holes in her head — without chloroform, a gas that was used at the time for anesthesia — to remove the growth.
Our country's medical history is not pretty. Before anesthesia, a couple or three big guys held you down while the doctor did his thing. Physicians only did surgery in a life or death situation - there was no such thing as elective surgery because NO ONE would have elected it!

A look at the timeline Use of Ether &Chloroform will help to clarify the evolution of anesthetics. Most regular doctors didn't start routinely using anesthesia until just before the Civil War. https://civilwartalk.com/threads/timeline-use-of-ether-and-chloroform-anesthesia.160239/
 
Our country's medical history is not pretty. Before anesthesia, a couple or three big guys held you down while the doctor did his thing. Physicians only did surgery in a life or death situation - there was no such thing as elective surgery because NO ONE would have elected it!

A look at the timeline Use of Ether &Chloroform will help to clarify the evolution of anesthetics. Most regular doctors didn't start routinely using anesthesia until just before the Civil War. https://civilwartalk.com/threads/timeline-use-of-ether-and-chloroform-anesthesia.160239/
From what I've read the early doctors in medicine took immense risks in doing so in their belief they could help people. Surgery wasn't generally accepted and a doctor could be mobbed if a patient died, they had to resort to grave robbing to have cadavers to dissect for either research or teaching.
 
Here are four cases you may know them...

The following accounts come from either historian Stephen Kenny’s “Power, opportunism, racism: Human Experiments Under American Slavery,” or the oral dictation of the former slave, John Brown. These instances have been selected, not because they show the singular horror or exceptional brutality of a few crazed or sadistic practitioners, but rather because they illuminate the ubiquity of slave experimentation as an acceptable method of inquiry and practice within a Southern medicine that “was harsh, ineffective, and experimental by nature,” to say the absolute least [7] .

Here:

In South Carolina circa 1848, Dr. Harvey Leonidas Byrd and Dr. T.J. Dozier administered an hour and 53 minutes of electroconvulsive current to a twelve-year-old slave girl named Harriet. Having been sent by her master to remedy her violent, convulsive spasms, Harriet had already been subject to heroic medical remedies of the day: bleeding, blistering, and purging. When those proved ineffectual, she was attached to an electro-magnetic battery and subsequently shocked. She was physically resistant to the therapy, to the point that the two doctors and another male medical assistant had to constrain her, and even cried out, “your are burning my back” several minutes after the current had stopped. The doctors construed this pained vocalization simply as proof that the treatment was a resounding success, considering that Harriet had not been able to speak during her seizures in the past [8].

Here:

Case 3: 1846. A “mulatto” slave man between the ages of thirty and forty came under the medical watch of slave-owner-physician A.B. Crook. Previously exhibited as a medical curiosity to a group of doctors, the slave man, who had a pulsating tumor that resembled “the external end of the mahogany knob of a chest of drawers,” had been diagnosed with a fungal infection. Despite an admitted unfamiliarity with such a disease, Crook deemed the diagnosis faulty and went to immediate work on the slave man in an attempt to enliven his own “white professional capital.” Prior to Crook’s intervention, the man’s skull had been initially trephined, leading to the growth of the tumor, which in turn caused degradation of major motor and speech skills: he could not control the right side of his body and was rendered physically incapable of speech. Crook first attempted ligature of the tumor, and after failing over the course of 4-5 days, removed the tumor along with a portion of “healthy looking brain;” post surgery, the portions of the brain protruded and continued to inflame and expand over the course of weeks until the slave expired, with “a large amount of very offensive, grumous, rather thick fluid discharged with the brain and blood…”[10].

Here:

Case 4: Enslaved on a plantation in the 1840’s, John Brown was subject to a variety of experimental tests and procedures administered by a local doctor named Thomas Hamilton, all under the collusive discretion of his master, Stevens. Primarily, Hamilton was concerned with finding a cure for sun stroke; in order to test the efficacy of his various concoctions, he had a few of Stevens’ slaves construct a pit filled with oak bark on the periphery of the plantation. The pit would be set alight with a stool resting on a plank immediately above the fire, and John Brown, who had been forced to strip naked, would sit on the stool after being administered one of Dr. Hamilton’s medicines and monitored until he collapsed from heat exhaustion. Hamilton, marking the degree of heat with each session, would conduct these trials seemingly ad infinitum until he had a marketable product. Each session was conducted after Brown’s full day of work on the plantation. Due to his experimentation on John Brown, Hamilton became obsessed with finding the physiological differences between blacks and whites [11].

Here the whole story link: https://lewiscar.sites.grinnell.edu...of-slavery-in-american-medicine-then-and-now/
 
Dr. Sims statue... in New York City... it was moved next to his grave...

This morning, a bronze monument of J. Marion Sims—a gynecologist who experimented on female slaves without anesthesia or consent in the late 1800s—was taken down from Central Park and will be relocated to the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. A modest crowd of press, advocates, and doctors clustered a few feet from the monument as reps from the New York City Public Design Commission pulled the statue down and transferred it onto a flatbed truck.

Link: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/...xperimented-on-slaves-moved-from-central-park

This is clearly an example of a local government that hasn't thought things through. They left the wall portion of the monument in place but went through the expense of statue removal and relocation to a cemetery along with a new plaque that will explain the doctor's “legacy of non-consensual medical experimentation on women of color broadly and Black women specifically that Sims has come to symbolize” as well as listing the names of the women who were experimented on, yet left the wall monument in its place. The people who will now became aware of Dr. Sim's diabolic experiments will be next to none. They should have left the statue where it was and added a large plaque that pointed out that although doctor Sim's surgery was considered a major medical breakthrough for women, his experiments were conducted on non-consenting (named) female slaves and were denounced by some of his peers. What location has a better chance of teaching actual history to more people -- a walled monument with statue and plaque in Central Park or a lone statue and plaque in a cemetery?
 
They should have left the statue where it was and added a large plaque that pointed out that although doctor Sim's surgery was considered a major medical breakthrough for women, his experiments were conducted on non-consenting (named) female slaves and were denounced by some of his peers. What location has a better chance of teaching actual history to more people -- a walled monument with statue and plaque in Central Park or a lone statue and plaque in a cemetery?

I think your thoughts are correct on this one. He did do some good with some awful things and the plague would update and correct his history...
 
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Why is this surprising? The history of medicine includes many advances made at the expense of uninformed or unwilling 'patients'. They were not necessarily limited to racial considerations and certainly not limited to the United States or the South. The indigent, the mentally ill, orphans regardless of race were the subject of many such experiments.
 
Why is this surprising? The history of medicine includes many advances made at the expense of uninformed or unwilling 'patients'. They were not necessarily limited to racial considerations and certainly not limited to the United States or the South. The indigent, the mentally ill, orphans regardless of race were the subject of many such experiments.

Its not surprising if one views the context of the times......At the time many would have viewed it little different or anymore unacceptable then a parent giving consent for a child's treatment today.
 
The Europeans Doctors did as our doctors did and did medical experiments on their Caribbean slaves.

Link: https://theconversation.com/the-hid...entation-on-caribbean-slave-plantations-81600

Here: doctor found a cure by the master no...

A British physician in Jamaica reported he had developed a “perfect cure” for yaws, a horrid tropical infection of the skin, bones and joints bred of poverty and poor sanitation. The experimental treatment was slated to take three or four months. The masters, not caring to “lose their Slaves’ labor” for so long, denied the doctor’s request.

Here: Here a racist thought...

Women also featured in Quier’s experiments, raising explosive questions about differences among women, many of which were about race.
For example, his London colleagues wondered whether his smallpox experiments done on “Negro women” were valid for English women. “Some gentlemen” in London were concerned that experiments done on slave women were not valid for “women of fashion, and of delicate constitutions.” Treatments appropriate for enslaved women, they warned, might well destroy ladies of “delicate habits, …educated in European luxury.”


Here:

However, numerous slaves were exploited in medical experiments at this time. John Quier, a British doctor working in rural Jamaica, freely experimented with smallpox inoculation in a population of 850 slaves during the 1768 epidemic. Inoculation, a precursor to vaccine, involved inducing a light case of the disease in a healthy person in hopes of immunizing that person for life.
Quier was employed by slave owners and would have inoculated plantation slaves for smallpox, with or without his scientific experiments. In all instances, masters had the final word. There was no issue of slave consent, or, for that matter, often physician consent.
But Quier did not simply inoculate to prevent disease. We see from his reports that he used slaves to explore questions that doctors in Europe dared not. He wanted to know, for example, whether one could safely inoculate menstruating or pregnant women. He also wanted to know if it was safe to inoculate newborn infants or a person already suffering from dropsy, yaws or fever and the


Slavery corrupts all our human values...
 
Why is this surprising?
It's NOT, given those times. But it does SHOCK human consciences with a drop of morals at any time or place - no matter what race, sex, religion and ethnic or national origin.
 
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