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

Throughout Medical Apartheid, Washington frequently explores the way in which white doctors display a lack of empathy in treating African Americans. White doctors often fail to show the same compassion towards their black patients that they do towards their white patients. Washington emphasizes this disparity in empathy in an anecdote in the Introduction, in which she stumbles upon two the files of two different patients, one white and one black. While the white patient is described compassionately, with the doctor describing his family personality, the black patient is far less fully described, with the file frequently emphasizing that he is “Negro” (14). The extreme difference in the two files epitomizes a long-standing gap in the care received by white and black medical patients.

Washington shows how this gulf in compassion has been an issue throughout American history. In particular, she focuses on how the teaching practices of 19th-century hospitals may have resulted in doctors’ losing their capacity for empathy with black patients. Doctors are frequently taught to be less caring for black patients: in one instance, a doctor tells his students that the “decision to amputate should be weighed differently according to the person’s race and class” (109).