Medical Apartheid is the inequity of health care based on racial classification. Unfortunately, the United States has a history of this practice. When we normalize inequality and the denial of human rights, we gravitate toward our lowest common denominator as human beings, our sin nature. But that is our American history.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” These were the words penned by Thomas Jefferson in 1776 and found in the Declaration of Independence. And yet those words only had one demographic in mind, rich, white, male, landowners.  Every other group had to fight for their right to these self-evident truths.

The irony is that while Jefferson put these words to paper, he held over 600 enslaved human beings of African descent, people whom he neglected to include in the statement “all men.”  Nor did the statement include women; however, women had to push for the collective interpretation of all men being inclusive of women.

Native Americans were seen as an obstruction to the advancement and progress of the dreams of white America. Therefore, they had to be destroyed or removed from their own land, and the survivors had to be indoctrinated into assimilating. The buffalo, one of their primary food sources, were virtually annihilated and left to rot in the sun, and European diseases contracted from gifted blankets from the settlers left many to die. 

That narrow category of “all men” did not include them. It did not include Mexicans or Asians or Middle Easterners, and in the beginning, it didn’t even include all men who are currently classified as white.

So, when it came to equality, no one was safe from inhumane treatment, who were not included in the accepted definition of “all men,” which often involved medical experimentation. And if you were at the bottom of the proverbial racial totem pole, you were more likely to receive the most extreme ill-treatment, much of what occurred in the medical arena.

Author Harriet Washington documents this history in her book entitled “Medical Apartheid.” She highlights various acts of savagery where African Americans were subject to being used as Guinea pigs in the medical world. Washington quotes Dr. King in her introduction, “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and the most inhumane.”  

One well-known medical instrument, the spectrum, used today for female exams, celebrates Dr. James Marion Sims as its inventor. Sims, known as “the father of gynecology,” has statutes erected in his honor and paintings depicting his image and work. He even has hospitals named after him.

But what isn’t advertised is how he came to develop the instrument and the enslaved women he brutally tortured and butchered in the name of progress. No anesthesia was used, and the women had to be restrained and forced to endure unimaginable pain.

It is reported that many of his assistants had to flee the room during the procedures because they were too gruesome. The belief was held, and unfortunately has largely carried over to this day, that Blacks feel less pain than their “white” counterparts and had an unusual ability to endure pain for longer periods. A recent study determined that many medical school graduates still hold this belief. 

Many are aware of the Tuskegee experiments conducted on African American men in Alabama, who went untreated for Syphilis, between the years 1932 and 1972. Unbeknownst to them, these men who were promised free medical care and burial insurance by the government, were observed to determine the effects the disease had on untreated people. The experiments were conducted on 399 men with the disease, out of the initial 600 participants, with 28 dying and another 100 passing away from related complications.     

It wasn’t until Peter Buxtun exposed the government experiment that the study was brought to an end.  

A lack of medical care facilities and healthy nutrition are often missing in these communities, known as food deserts, and are commonplace in minority-populated areas. The consequential poor eating habits and environmental conditions, inclusive of unsanitary water sources, all contribute to ongoing health problems in impoverished minority communities, and poor health is big business in America.  And much of that business rests on the shoulders of minorities, America’s Guinea pigs.