The Book Medical Apartheid - Essay Example

Columbia University in collaboration with New York State Psychiatric Institute experimented on black Dominican boys and African-Americans which helped them to find a genetic predisposition for their particular behavior.

Washington has covered in this book a wide range of topics-- the research carried out on black prisoners in the 20th century; some hospitals giving treatment free of charge to black patients so that they could own black bodies after death for anatomy classes.

Washington takes clues from unpublished reports and medical journals that acknowledge racial bias. The author mentions the experiments and medical abuses that were carried out on blacks including women and children in the military hospital without any consent or notification to them.

The extensive abusive medical experimentation in the past has made many African Americans now skeptical and they are reluctant to participate in any life-saving medical studies. He gives a specific example of HIV inhibitor AZT for which no trials were made on African Americans. U.S. Food and Drug Administration thereby reached a false notion that drugs were ineffective on blacks.  Washington categorically points out that if blacks were involved earlier in the original studies, the number of HIV-infected African Americans had been much fewer in numbers today.