written by Daniel John
illustrated by Sara Kian
I
TO DO NO HARM
n a room lined with shelves upon shelves of medical textbooks and anatomy models, I sat across from Dr. Tyrone Hardy. Doctors aspire to work the frontiers of their fields; Dr. Hardy is a peak example with 50 years of physicianship and as one of the first African American surgeons specialized in stereotactic neurosurgery. Medical students commit to such a path upon taking the Hippocratic Oath, committing to “do no harm” to patients, prevent illness whenever possible, and treat patients as humans rather than infectious beings. However, if one were to follow the trajectory of Black individuals’ health care through the history of the United States, the opposite becomes apparent; medicine has often involved taking rather than giving. Many of the treatments we have today are a result of unethical experimentation on populations that were never compensated for their contributions. Unraveling and exposing this reality is important to understanding the foundations of Western medicine. Despite the barriers posed by racist institutions and the doctors that reinforced them, African Americans have time and again contributed to the advancement of medicine for all. An understanding of contemporary medical practice would be remiss without considering its convoluted origins.
2 | sqonline.ucsd.edu
Dr. Saiba Varma is a professor of Anthropology at UC San Diego. Varma teaches courses on global health, inequality, and medical and psychological anthropology. She asserts, “We have to think about the ways in which public health as a discipline emerged as a part of the project of colonialism; it was designed to control Black and Brown bodies and produce maximum labor out of these bodies.” Colonial medicine was in-
formed by prejudiced beliefs rather than science. White doctors adjusted medical infrastructure according to their belief in their own superiority; they created separate hospitals and medical school curriculums, and their research studies treated Black bodies as fundamentally different from white bodies. According to the Washington Post, white slave-owning doctors put forth claims, for example that Black men had smaller brains and thinner blood vessels, despite a complete lack of evidence for their assertions. Specialized physicians relied on entirely different medical literature while treating Black slaves. Medical knowledge was generally inaccessible to the public, lending little means for accountability and allowing medicine to remain a tool for a small group of elites to justify racist beliefs. With tensions over slavery flaring up across the United States in the 1800s, African American leaders concentrated their efforts to challenge racial norms. They recognized that racism would also have to be challenged on the scientific front to dispel notions of biological or intellectual inferiority. In 1837, Dr. James McCune Smith became the first African American to graduate with a medical degree. He had been rejected from med-
