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Read the reflection by third-year undergraduate students in History at the University of Liverpool on the Harold Cohen Library's Black History Month exhibition.
The exhibit Medicine, Pseudoscience, Ethnobotany and Enslavement currently showcased in the silent study room at the Harold Cohen Library is an insightful, educational and respectful history of the exploitation of enslaved people by the medical profession.
As the display states, “contributions to science of many Black and marginalised people are often obscured”, reflecting the intersection of “Empire, racism, dehumanisation, and unethical medical practices” enslaved people experienced in the shadows of famous scientists. We are third year History students studying the history of human experimentation in the United States and have delved deep into the dark history of Black and marginalised peoples’ exploitation by doctors and scientists in pursuit of medical advancement before, during, and long after slavery. This exhibit offers an accessible introduction to this often-forgotten aspect of the history of modern medicine.
The Mothers of Gynaecology
The exhibit explores the abuses of medicine within the context of slavery, highlighting how enslaved people were experimented on without “adequate anaesthesia or proper medical care”. One notable case which the exhibit explores is of Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy “the Mothers of Gynaecology” who were experimented on by the Montgomery-based physician-enslaver James Marion Sims. Like many other white pioneers in medicine, Sims exploited the system of slavery which gave him unrestricted access to experiment on enslaved people. This was common practice across the US as enslaved people were used as a commodity of medicine, rather than people and were dehumanised into objects for medical advancements, their bodies used even after their death.
Dangerous Medical Myths
As the exhibit explains, the exploitation of Black people produced myths about the black body such as, Black people were less receptive of pain. Internalised racist ideology in the practice of medicine, is punctuated by the timeline of Racialised Pseudoscientific Myths about Black People. Seen on the back of the display, the timeline chronicles the experiments conducted on enslaved people, the white medical professionals involved and celebrated for their horrific experiments. The timeline explores many cases of medical abuse such as: John Brown’s experience as an enslaved research subject in Georgia and the experiments of the South Carolina physician-enslaver Dr. Philip Tidyman, exploring the myths which they created about Black people and their subsequent impact on Black communities and medical theory and teaching, and the debunking of these myths, by modern scholars.
Black agency and resistance
The exhibit also includes a display case which holds items linked to the topic of medicine within slavery, helping to add another layer to the story of medical exploitations and resistance. The case holds multiple natural remedies which were used by enslaved communities, such as Cotton root, which the display explains was used to induce premature labour. As the display highlights, forms of community medicine were central to enslaved people as it provided them with a sense of safety and trust in their medicine and eliminated fears of “painful and dangerous” experimentation which white doctors provided. Many scholars such as Sharla Fett in her book Working Cures have argued that community medicine was a form of resistance and agency for enslaved communities as they resisted racist and inadequate medical care.
Centring the voices and experiences of the enslaved
The telling of enslaved narratives in this display actively works against the scholarly concept of “assemblages of violence” wherein absences in history through ignorance, minimising, or forgetting, seek to disrupt historical framings of violence. Black and marginalised people whose lives and experiences had remained in the long shadow cast by white medical professionals are now respectfully presented so others can read, remember, and learn from their history, a history that previously excluded these central narratives.
A university studying slavery
This exhibition contributes to the growing acknowledgments of scholars, cities, and institutions about their place in the darker side of medicine, especially during the era of slavery. Liverpool has only recently begun a more serious wrestling with its complex history and place within slavery, as the city was a vital stop in the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Placing the exhibit in the Harold Cohen library (a largely scientific library) allows these histories and the widespread medical abuse to become more widely recognised, thus helping to acknowledge the University’s own entanglements in the system of slavery and contributions to medical racism which are slowly coming to light. Most importantly, this exhibit allows the voices of enslaved peoples to be finally heard and their contributions to the development of medicine finally learned and celebrated.
Written by Belle Hall and Caitlin Jefferies
(Third year undergraduates in History at the University of Liverpool)