- If you missed the New York Times‘s 1619 project, which appeared in a special edition of the New York Times Magazine, you should definitely check out the PDF, which is available for free online. Here is a passage from Linda Villarosa’s essay on how physical differences were used to reinforce slavery:
Over
the centuries, the two most persistent physiological myths — that black
people were impervious to pain and had weak lungs that could be
strengthened through hard work — wormed their way into scientific
consensus, and they remain rooted in modern-day medical education and
practice. In the 1787 manual “A Treatise on Tropical Diseases; and on
The Climate of the West-Indies,” a British doctor, Benjamin Moseley,
claimed that black people could bear surgical operations much more than
white people, noting that “what would be the cause of insupportable pain
to a white man, a Negro would almost disregard.” To drive home his
point, he added, “I have amputated the legs of many Negroes who have
held the upper part of the limb themselves.”
These
misconceptions about pain tolerance, seized upon by pro-slavery
advocates, also allowed the physician J. Marion Sims — long celebrated
as the father of modern gynecology — to use black women as subjects in
experiments that would be unconscionable today, practicing painful
operations (at a time before anesthesia was in use) on enslaved women in
Montgomery, Ala., between 1845 and 1849. In his autobiography, “The
Story of My Life,” Sims described the agony the women suffered as he cut
their genitals again and again in an attempt to perfect a surgical
technique to repair vesico-vaginal fistula, which can be an extreme
complication of childbirth.
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