Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

Harriet A. Washington is a scholar of medical ethics, a subset of bioethics. Bioethics is a field that explores ethical issues related primarily to human health and explores topics like medicine, biotechnology, politics, and law. Within bioethics, medical ethics specifically concerns itself with ethical practices in medicine and scientific research. Conversations about medical ethics were as old as medicine itself, with the Hippocratic Oath dating back to the fifth century BC. In the 19th and 20th centuries, different rules and codes of medical ethics emerged, such as the American Medical Association’s first code of ethics in 1847. As outlined in Medical Apartheid, these codes were often unevenly applied, and many Black people and other marginalized groups suffered medical abuse from doctors. Some medical codes emerged in response to atrocities. For example, the Holocaust led to the Nuremberg Codes (1947), which outline 10 ethical principles for medical experiments on humans.

Medical ethics are rooted in four key principles: autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice. Autonomy refers to a patient’s right to refuse treatment or otherwise guide their treatment; in other words, the patient ultimately has control over their body. An important aspect of autonomy is