“Ensconced in a chair, I eagerly began to describe my work [to the white medical professor], only to be cut off before I had completed the first sentence. Bolting upright in her chair, she vehemently informed me that the topic of this book was taboo. “It’s a terrible thing that you are doing. You are going to make African Americans afraid of medical research and physicians! You cannot write this book!"
As she glared at me, her face became contorted with anger, suffused with blood, and her breathing grew rapid. For a moment, I was stunned into silence, because nothing had prepared me for her reaction. After all, freedom of speech and academic freedom are sacred in this country. I was also a bit surprised that a white academic whose discussions and syllabus had events no interest or expertise in the matter should lecture me, and experienced African American medical writer, about health communication with African Americans.
She proceeded to inform me that there had been no medical research utilizing African Americans before the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, certainly not in the antebellum past, and when I asked her how she knew this, she countered, "Can you prove that there was?" When I responded simply "Yes," she disgorged a clumsy inquisition, unleashing a barrage of questions that showed she knew nothing about the subject at hand. I responded that my work was well researched and that she had raised an interesting question:
Was it indeed my work that would make African Americans wary of health care and medical research? Or had the work of those whose abused I proposed to chronicle already achieved this? The answer was all too obvious… Black Americans did not need me or anyone else to inculcate a fear of medicine. Medical history and practices had long since done so.”
Introduction- Medical Apartheid, Harriet A. Washington
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