An excerpt from the NY Times -
How Black People Learned Not to Trust
Concerns about vaccination are unfortunate, but they have historical roots.
By Charles M. Blow
The unfortunate American fact is that Black people in this country have been well-trained, over centuries, to distrust both the government and the medical establishment on the issue of health care.
In the mid-1800s a man in Alabama named James Marion Sims gained national renown as a doctor after performing medical experiments on enslaved women, who by definition of their position in society could not provide informed consent.
He performed scores of experimental operations on one woman alone, an enslaved woman named Anarcha, before perfecting his technique.
Not only that, he operated on these women without anesthesia, in part because he didn’t believe that Black women experienced pain in the same way that white women did, a dangerous and false sensibility whose remnants linger to this day.
When he finally got his experiments to be successful, he began to use them on white women, but he would begin to use anesthesia for those women.
As medical writer Durrenda Ojanuga wrote in the Journal of Medical Ethics in 1993: “Many white women came to Sims for treatment of vesicovaginal fistula after the successful operation on Anarcha. However, none of them, due to the pain, were able to endure a single operation.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/06/opinion/blacks-vaccinations-health.html
