Sandra Lindsay sat still as the needle went into her skin. She stared straight ahead at the media and photographers eager to capture the historic moment. She had received the COVID-19 vaccine for the first time in the country. Lindsay 52, who is the director of critical-care nursing at Long Island Jewish Medical Center. She has also witnessed the number of deaths due to the coronavirus. Lindsay saw her December vaccination as a chance to stop the outbreak. She could not miss the significance of a Black woman being the first American to receive the vaccine. Though she wanted to reduce skepticism in communities of color about the vaccination, she understood that the country's history of racist medical practices cannot be changed in a flash. Since the beginning of the nation at the time of its founding, the American medical establishment has exposed Black bodies to torture, exploitation, and experimentation. For scientific research, corpses were retrieved out of the ground. Black women being sterilized without their knowledge and robbed of the opportunity to bear children. The whole Black community was misled into believing that they were immune to a fatal illness. Black people have been repeatedly betrayed by the medical system, which has engendered deep-rooted suspicion. To discover more details about society, you must visit racial justice website. The most well-known example of research conducted on Black body parts was the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which sharecroppers were denied treatment for syphilis throughout 40 years. In 1932, U.S. Public Health Service personnel recruited hundreds of poor, uneducated African American men with syphilis and watched them die unavoidable deaths over time until an effective cure was discovered. In 1972, the results of the study was made the media. In 1975, the research participants were awarded $10 million in a settlement in a class action and, in 1997, President Bill Clinton apologized. "When we discuss the reasons the reasons Black people shouldn't be able to believe in a medical institution many people cite Tuskegee as a reason, which is understandable," said Rana Hogarth, a history professor at the University of Illinois. "But Tuskegee does not represent the end. Medical abuse on the slave ship, plantationBlack anxiety about getting medical treatment could be rooted in the stomach of slave ships, say experts. The entire Middle Passage experience was based on fear and violence as the foundation of medical treatment. A lot of slave ships had doctors. Although some were professionals, many took a cruel method of treating sick Africans. Merchants and owners could take in insurance cash to cover the costs of sick captives. Captives were often required to take food or medication and were threatened with an axe, a cutlass, or a pistol. Carolyn Roberts, a Yale history professor, claimed that slaves were able to have their jaws pried open using the torture tools to make food go down their throats. Roberts declared, "This was a novel method of treatment in which people who were enslaved were dehumanized to the point that these ill-treatments were a regular par for the norm." The medical care provided to the Africans following their sale and transferred was varied. The male owners usually wanted to reduce their involvement with daily medical care, according to Sharla Fett, a historian professor at Occidental College in Los Angeles. The women who were enslaved often had to do the work of providing health healthcare. Surveillance officers were responsible for taking daily health care decisions on larger plantations. They also prescribed medicine and vaccinated. The relationship between doctors and enslaved patients was fundamentally strained due to the fact that the slaveholders controlled slave bodies. This led to slaves being "medically incompetent" as they were not able to stop or initiate treatment with consent from their owners. Fett, who wrote in her award-winning book "Working Cures" about the dehumanizing ways that slave owners employed medicine, said that this premise resulted in slaves being "medically incompetent". Slaveholders could have used drugs to punish and torture slaves in certain instances. Moses Roper, a former slave, described one horrifying instance in his 1838 account about his escape from a South Carolina cotton farm. A cruel slave owner forced female slaves to consume as much castor oil, a purgative, as she could. He then forced her to rest in a wooden box and weighed it down with stones, so that it was unable to open. He locked her in the box for a night and then buried her in her trash. One slave was ordered to vomit by his owner in order to amuse his family. The owner of the slaves was punished by placing them in stock above one another. He made them take large quantities of medicine and forced them to shed their "filth" upon one another.
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