"We have seen that scientific racists successfully promoted several necessary medical fictions that made Blacks attractive as experimental subjects. Most physicians of the day also believed that Blacks had low intellectual capacities and were sexually promiscuous, that diseases manifested differently in Blacks, and that Blacks could not be trusted to take medicine, follow treatment, or maintain basic standards of hygiene without white supervision.
Finally, physicians believe that Blacks naturally harbored diseases, notably syphilis, that threatened the health of whites. Each of these common beliefs served as rationales for abusive medical experimentation. One of the most tenacious beliefs was that Blacks did not feel pain or anxiety, which excused painful surgical explorations without anesthesia on Blacks.
Dr. Charles White declared that "[Blacks] surgical operations better than white people and what would be the cause of insupportable pain for white men, a negro would almost disregard... [I have] amputated the legs of many Negroes, who have held the upper part of the limbs themselves."
And when Kentucky surgeon Efraim McDowell wrote of gynecologic advances that were achieved by exquisitely painful surgeries, Dr. James Johnson, editor of the London Medical and Churugical Review, sneered, "when we come to reflect that all the women operated upon in Kentucky, except one, were Negresses and that these people will bear anything with nearly if not quite as much impunity as dogs and rabbits, our wonder is lessened."
Chapter 2- Medical Apartheid, Harriet A. Washington
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