Medical Experimentation and Race in the Eighteenth-century Atlantic World |
Medical Experimentation and Race in the Eighteenth-century Atlantic World
Social History of Medicine
Volume 26, Issue 3 (August 2013)
pages 364-382
DOI: 10.1093/shm/hkt011
Londa Schiebinger, The John L. Hinds Professor of History of Science
Stanford University
This article examines medical experimentation with humans in the Atlantic world. Physicians in this period tended to use bodies interchangeably in medical trials; subjects were scarce and, for the most part, used with extreme care. Experimentalists in this period, however, faced a paradox. In the second half of the eighteenth century naturalists across Europe began focusing attention on what they perceived to be racial differences. At the same time medical experimentalists required that human bodies be fully interchangeable if results were to hold universally. The dilemma, then, was this: on the one hand, physicians tended to emphasize racial difference with respect to the science of race; on the other hand, they assumed uniformity across humans with respect to developing drug therapies. It was in this context that important questions arose about whether experiments done among Caribbean slave populations were valid for Europeans.
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Tags: Londa Schiebinger, Social History of Medicine