Sandra Lindsay sat still as the needle sank into her skin. She looked straight ahead at the crowd of cameras and journalists eager to capture the historic moment. She received the COVID-19 vaccine for first time in the country. Lindsay 52-year-old Lindsay 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 an opportunity to stop the spread of the disease. She could not miss the significance of a Black woman becoming the first American to get vaccinated. She was hoping to calm skepticism about the vaccine in communities of color, but she understood the legacy of this country's discriminatory medical practices cannot be reversed in a flash. The American medical establishment has been subject to abuse, exploitation, and even experimentation since its founding. Corpses are pulled out of the ground to study scientifically. Black women are sterilized, without their knowledge, and are denied the possibility to have children. The entire Black community was deceived into believing that they were immune to a fatal illness. Time and time again, Black people have been deceived by the medical establishment, fostering a lingering, deep-rooted mistrust. To discover more details on community, you have to visit black travel website. The most well-known example of experimentation 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 employees enlisted hundreds of uninformed, poor African American men with syphilis and watched them die avoidable deaths over time and even after the discovery of a cure. The discovery of the experiment became the subject of headlines in 1972. In 1975, study participants were awarded a $10 million settlement in a class action and in 1997 President Bill Clinton apologized. Rana Hogarth, University of Illinois historian, stated, "When we talk to why Black people would not trust a healthcare establishment, many people talk about Tuskegee. Which makes sense." "But Tuskegee does not represent the end of the road. Medical abuse on the plantation and slave shipBlack fears of the treatment provided by doctors could begin in the belly of slave vessels, experts said. Medical care on ships was based on violence and terror which was evident throughout the Middle Passage experience. There were many slave ships with doctors. Though some doctors were professional, many took a cruel treatment of sick Africans. Owners and merchants could pay in insurance money to cover the expenses of captives who were sick. Captives were often required to take food or medication while being threatened by a whip, cutlass or pistol. In some instances, slaves' jaws were forced open by torture instruments, which would fracture their teeth to make food go down their throats, said Carolyn Roberts, a history professor at Yale. "This was a new form of medicine in which enslaved individuals were dehumanized to the point that violations were just an ordinary part of the course," Roberts said. The medical care provided to the Africans after they were sold and moved was diverse. Sharla Fett an historian at Occidental College, Los Angeles said that the male owners tended to restrict their participation in the daily health treatment. The burden of daily sick care often fell upon the shoulders of slave women. Surveillance officers were responsible for taking daily health care decisions for large plantations. They also prescribed medicines and administered vaccinations. The relationship between physicians and enslaved patients was fundamentally strained due to the fact that slaveholders had agency over the bodies of slaves. This made slaves "medically incapable" and unable to initiate or prevent treatments without a slaveowner's consent, said Fett, who outlined the dehumanizing ways slave owners utilized the medical profession in her book, "Working Cures." In some cases, slaveholders used medicines to punish and torture slaves. One ex-slave, Moses Roper, detailed one harrowing example in his 1838 story about his escape from the South Carolina cotton plantation. A cruel slave owner made female slaves to consume as much castor oil purgative, as she could. Then, he stuffed her to eat into a wooden box and put it on a slack with stones, so that she was unable to open it. He locked her in the box for one night and then buried her in her own garbage. A slave was ordered by a master to drink a medicine that caused vomiting to entertain his family. Another slaver was punished by placing them in stocks set up above the other. He made them take large quantities of medicine and forced them to release their "filth" upon one another.
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