by Rachel May
We buried him in St. Philips by the side of my mother, [Sophia]. It rained so incessantly that we had to remain till near evening before the funeral could take place and I think I never witnessed such a rain as till that night. He is now at rest and we hope enjoying that happiness which his infancy and virtues entitle him to. His countenance after death was sweet and serene and he seemed to be happy.
Now Susan: Eliza, I have wished you were here now very much. It seemed so lonely when we came down after the funeral. Eliza [Crouch] had been staying with me a day or two at the time of Hasell’s death. It was very fortunate for me that she happened to be down here at that time. I wish you could see the baby, [Emily]. She is the most quiet child I ever saw. She never cries. You would not know there was a baby in the house until you saw her. She is much more lively than Hasell ever was. Every one says she looks like her father and I think she does, too. I do not have any trouble with her. She sleeps all night, always goes to sleep about sunset and sleeps till after sunrise. I think it is on account of my having so good a nurse when I was confined. My health never was better than it is now and it has been so for the year past.
Hassell once more: The sudden and unlooked for loss of our dear little boy has been a great shock to us, but when we reflect upon his probable condition had he lived, we are reconciled his mind has been impaired for some time, and I think it probable he never would have recovered fully. The baby is in good health, very lively. My love to all, your affectionate son, HWC
“Sleepy for a week before he died.” Hasell sawed off the crib’s legs, and it was “the same height as our bedstead.” Little Hasell seemed fine, just troubled by his stomach. Worms, they thought. Maybe he needed a concoction that might help him pass a worm again, as he’d done the summer before—pink root and coffee, that was the medicine—and blisters, they applied blisters. This would be the cure. The doctor had a plaster that would produce a blister—something made from mustard seeds, perhaps—it produced heat, made the skin pucker up, and then the skin would be lanced and the fluid oozed out, and with it, the sickness and the pain. Mustard plaster, sinapism. Cantharides, ground blister beetles—the Spanish fly, for example, its shiny green shell a hint of the sting it could emit. Crunch up the shell, make a paste, apply the paste and wait for the blisters to appear. Feel the skin heat as the plaster sits. See the skin rise. These were Hasell’s tools. For a time, leeching had been in vogue. One the same as the other, who could say. The doctor said that the blisters hurt Little Hasell, but that it was the only pain he felt before he died. Were the blisters applied to his head? His stomach? Where did the doctor apply the blisters to ease the baby’s pain? How must it have felt to have been blistered, at two years, nine months, and sixteen days old? How must it have felt to apply blisters to one’s own child’s skin, inflicting pain in the desperate hope of healing? The baby must have looked at his father and wondered why he was hurting him so much, and if he’d lived, he might have come to associate love and pain as necessarily intertwined for the rest of his life, might have sought out all the things that hurt and then ruptured into relief, believing this was love.
The white muslin gown Susan likely stitched for her pregnancy with Emily.
This was the state of medicine before vaccinations or even variolations (the prelude to vaccines), before the flu shot and the shot for mumps, measles, and rubella, before the whooping cough shot or even over-the-counter Tylenol to bring down a fever. Before heating pads to soothe and cold packs and ice cubes easily stored in the electric freezer to bring down swelling, before Ace bandages and quick-set casts, before x-rays and—worst of all, if the break was bad—before anesthesia, before the pins and plates we’ve developed to stabilize fragments of bone, before open-heart surgery, blood transfusions, the ability to check blood for disease. There was no nurse marching down a hospital corridor with the promise of pain relief in her hands—codeine, morphine, muscle relaxers. There were ambulances, but they were drawn by horses. Imagine racing down the road at ten miles an hour, pulled by a pair of draft horses as you rocked in the back, your appendix bursting in your side, seeping into sepsis. If a leg was infected or too badly broken to save, it needed amputating; it was sawed off with a handsaw, and a piece of wood was stuffed between the patient’s teeth so he wouldn’t bite off his own tongue from the excruciating pain of bone and muscle and skin being torn from flesh, the shaking of the body as the doctor moved the saw back and forth, the blood spurting up against the walls with sufficient or insufficient tourniquets, as the case may be. The patient was luckiest if he passed out.
Before there were laws determining on whom medicine could be practiced—not practiced, as in served, but practiced as in working on skills—there were other ways of finding bodies that could be forced to submit. Today, there are dummies for the insertion of needles and compression of chests. There are cadavers donated for dissection. But then? In 1835 and 1836? There were enslaved people of color. That is one of the most disturbing truths—that white doctors and medical students learned and practiced their craft on the enslaved men and women from the city. They chose to experiment on people of color, to learn which incision was most effective, which knife most precise, which stitch the best for stitching wounds—which the doctors would first have had to make—which procedure—no matter how invasive—the swiftest for healing ailments. Hortense Spillers cites William Goodell’s 1853 anti-slavery text that includes an advertisement in the Charleston Mercury in 1838; Dr. S advertises for sick enslaved people, to be used for medical experiments. Goodell notes that enslaved people were commonly “bought up . . . by medical institutions, to be experimented and operated upon, for purposes of ‘medical education.’ . . .” The ad reads:
To planters and others—Wanted, fifty Negroes, any person, having sick Negroes, considered incurable by their respective physicians, and wishing to dispose of them, Dr. S. will pay cash for Negroes affected with scrofula, or king’s evil, confirmed hypochondriasm, apoplexy, diseases of the liver, kidneys, spleen, stomach and intestines, bladder and its appendages, diarrhea, dysentery, etc. The highest cash price will be paid, on application as above, at No. 110 Church St., Charleston.
Just five years earlier, there was Hasell at the medical college in Charleston, attending lectures and observing procedures before trying them himself—this was how you pulled a tooth (take out this man’s molar), this was how you conduct a vaginal exam (put your fingers inside this woman), this was how you make an incision to cut only the top layer of skin, now deeper, now into muscle, and alongside bone (ignore the young boy’s screams, keep on cutting). Let us try this treatment for diarrhea and dysentery, let us try to remove the kidney to find the cure. There was no anesthesia, no pristinely cleaned room that today is labeled “sterile.” There was a house or an operating theater. There was Coster’s Phisician’s Practice, Coster’s Surgical, Reports on Cholera, Engravings of Arteries—Hasell’s semi-useful books, the best of his time.
They did not help Anarcha, Betsy, and Lucy, who were brought from a plantation in Montgomery in 1845, to be the patients—subjects—of Dr. Sims, who wrote about them in his work on resolving vesicovaginal fistulas. This is a hole between the bladder and the vagina, so that urine runs into the vagina and drips out constantly, onto, Sims said, the linens and clothes and produces, he said, a “burning similar to . . . smallpox, with constant pain and burning.” Except, says Deborah McGregor, writing in our time, Anarcha was not dying of the fistula, as one would have died from smallpox. She was not the “disgusting” creature Sims described, but a seventeen-year-old who had probably been raped, whose uterus had retracted because of rickets (a disease caused by a lack of vitamin D, a disease of malnutrition); she was a woman in pain—a teenager, we would call her today, and she would be in high school—she was probably always hungry, sore from rickets and from overwork, but she was not dying, and she was not foul. She was strong, to have survived her childhood, the rape, the birth, and then the experiments that followed.
Bettina Ju
dd wrote a book of poems about these three women. “The art of dying a slave is / one for those who know the lash to be a kiss on your will . . . ”
One hundred years later, there was Henrietta Lacks, whose body was used by a doctor who took her cells and reproduced them, a thousand times over, a million, whose cells solved countless mysteries of disease and inoculation, but who was given no pay and no credit and no chance to consent to this use of her body.
In between Anarcha and Henrietta Lacks, there were so many hundreds more. There was a man named Fed, an enslaved man, who was put into a hot pit—heated by fire from underneath, perhaps—and made to sit there until he passed out. The “doctor” gave him medicine to see what made him stay conscious longest. Fed was put into the pit “five or six times,” and the products of his suffering were the medicine that other people were forced to take on the hot days out in the field, yielding to their owners their longest days, the highest pile of cotton or rice or indigo or tobacco. There were so many more enslaved people who were subject to experiments, whose names we don’t know. Sick slaves were called for, and owners “donated” them, knowing they’d get them back healthy if they were cured, and that if they weren’t cured, they wouldn’t have to pay for their food and care as they ailed, useless, on their plantations, nor for their burials.
You know of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, experiments performed by the US Public Health Service from the 1930s to the 1970s on black men who had syphilis. The doctors didn’t prescribe the necessary medications, so that they could see how the men fared as the disease progressed. For forty long years. I think of how long my own lifetime, forty years, has felt, and try to imagine waiting that long. Penicillin was discovered in 1928 and used for syphilis in the late 1940s. For decades, black men were denied by white doctors and scientists the antibiotics that would save their minds and lives. I think of the days I spent sitting through long school years—each season passing out a window, winter’s piles of snow and mornings we shoveled out, spring’s slow green in New England, hot summers in the woods with July blueberries, and then those orange falls—each year, each season, men were sick and getting sicker, watching their children from their beds as they died. Instead of being so easily cured, as they could have been, the doctors experimenting on them allowed them to suffer and die. Instead of having the chance to watch their children grow up, instead of coming home to their wives after work each day in the ’40s, instead of watching the civil-rights era bloom and fight in the ’60s, instead of singing along with Nat King Cole and Ella Fitzgerald on the record player, instead of seeing Katherine Dunham dance or, for the most talented dancer who might have been among them, trying out for Alvin Ailey’s new company, instead of applying to Howard University for the medical degree so that he could become a surgeon, instead of talking about the Selma march and celebrating the Voting Rights Act, instead of making eggs sunnyside up for the children each morning, kissing their heads as they walk out the door to school, playing catch in the backyard on a Saturday, holding their wives as they fell asleep each night. Instead, these men slipped into—were made to, allowed to slip into, by those white doctors—delirium, then insanity, losing what they did not need to lose, leaving behind their beloved wives and lovers and children and parents and siblings. For forty years. For what?
Tuskegee was based upon a long tradition. A century earlier, the bodies of enslaved black people were being stolen from cemeteries in the night for dissections, at the behest of white doctors and administrators. Enslaved people were subjected to experiments, which they endured day after day, and once these procedures were perfected, as was the case with Sims’s vesicovaginal fistula fix, then the treatments were offered to white women, who could choose to submit to the treatment or not. Those women profited from the pain Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsy endured under Sims’s knife. “Lucy’s agony was extreme,” Sims wrote of his experiments. “She was much prostrated, and I thought that she was going to die; but by irrigating the parts of the bladder she recovered with great rapidity.”
Irrigating the parts of the bladder, he wrote. This without anesthesia, antibiotics, or the painkillers that welcome us when we emerge from surgery today. Doctors do all they can to keep us—some of us—from pain today, asking when we enter the office for a routine exam, “Are you in any pain?” or when we come in for an injury or sickness, “What’s your pain on a scale of one to ten?” They administer numbing agents to the skin before injections or incisions, they inject novocaine before working on our teeth and their tender nerves. I think of doctor women who provided herbs and medical assistance on plantations, of the countless midwives who “caught” babies—people whose enslavement couldn’t prevent them from caring for one another and finding cures that white doctors, like Hasell, would come to use themselves. Hasell’s medical notebooks include “homeopathic” treatments; many of the herbal recipes and tinctures he learned at medical school were discovered and developed by Native Americans and African Americans.
African Americans are still, today, perceived by white doctors to feel less pain than whites. Scientists published a study that reveals how racial bias still affects blacks who are treated in the US medical industry:
A young man goes to the doctor complaining of severe pain in his back. He expects and trusts that a medical expert, his physician, will assess his pain and prescribe the appropriate treatment to reduce his suffering. After all, a primary goal of health care is to reduce pain and suffering. Whether he receives the standard of care that he expects, however, is likely contingent on his race/ethnicity. Prior research suggests that if he is black, then his pain will likely be underestimated and undertreated compared with if he is white. The present work investigates one potential factor associated with this racial bias. Specifically, in the present research, we provide evidence that white laypeople and medical students and residents believe that the black body is biologically different—and in many cases, stronger—than the white body. Moreover, we provide evidence that these beliefs are associated with racial bias in perceptions of others’ pain, which in turn predict accuracy in pain treatment recommendations. . . .
Black patients, say the researchers, are “less likely to be given pain medications” than white patients, and if they’re given any, they’re given “lower quantities.” This could be because doctors fear that black patients won’t comply with treatment or medication instructions, or it could be because they believe black people to be biologically different, more capable of enduring pain, stronger, with “thicker skin.” The researchers write that “many people insist that black people are better athletes—stronger, faster, and more agile—as a result of natural selection and deliberate breeding practices during slavery.” The idea that blacks and whites are different has been perpetuated since before our nation’s founding, by people who needed to defend and maintain the system of enslavement—people who profited from it. “These beliefs were championed by scientists, physicians, and slave owners alike to justify slavery and the inhumane treatment of black men and women in medical research.” They cite Samuel Cartwright, who wrote in 1851, that black people didn’t feel pain when they were being punished. And, they say, “Today, many laypeople, scientists, and scholars continue to believe that the black body is biologically and fundamentally different from the white body and that race is a fixed marker of group membership, rooted in biology.” People don’t believe that race is a fiction, in other words, but believe that blacks and whites are fundamentally, biologically, different. People still buy into the myths that were spread by both public figures like Cartwright and average middle class people like Winthrop, Susan, and Hilton, to keep enslavement in practice.
It wasn’t so long after emancipation that African Americans founded their own medical schools—the first in 1870 in Pennsylvania just six years after slavery was abolished. Long before that, in 1837, James McCune Smith earned his medical degree, the first African American to do so. His mother had bought her freedom—and therefore ensured her children would be fre
e, too—and, as a child, he went to the African Free School in New York. When he was rejected by white American college administrators because of his race, he raised the money he needed to go abroad, to Scotland, to earn his degrees at the University of Glasgow. Another decade later, David Jones Peck earned his medical degree at a college in Chicago, becoming the first African American to earn a medical degree in the United States.
James McCune Smith, bust portrait, engraving by Patrick H. Reason
Twenty years after him, in 1864, Rebecca Lee Crumpler became the first African American woman to earn a medical degree; she attended a medical college for women in Boston. After she retired, she wrote the first book on medicine by an African American; her Book of Medical Discourses, published in 1883, was directed toward women and children: “treating the cause, prevention, and cure of infantile bowel complaints . . .” and “miscellaneous information concerning the life and growth of beings; the beginning of womanhood; also, the cause, prevention, and cure of many of the most distressing complaints of women, and youth of both sexes.” By the time she wrote the book, she’d gone back to Boston, and then moved to New York, after treating “freedmen,” formerly enslaved people, in Virginia during the Civil War.
No images of Rebecca Lee Crumpler exist, though some are misattributed as portraits of her online. This image is of Carol V. Still Wiley Anderson, who graduated from the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania (which later became part of Drexel University) in 1878, about fourteen years after Dr. Crumpler. Dr. Anderson’s parents were Philadelphia abolitionists.
Doctors Crumpler, Anderson, Peck, and McCune Smith must have known this history of white doctors and medical students experimenting on enslaved people in medical colleges. What must it have been like to walk through the college doors that first day, the first to enter a system that systematically abused African American bodies? At the medical college, Hasell most certainly performed experiments on the corpses of people of color, and, based on that Charleston Mercury ad of 1838, likely on living enslaved people as well. My mind turns from Susan witnessing Hasell’s medical exams with pride at his performance, to follow them on their walk home, down dirt and cobblestone streets, chatting about the day’s questions, how he fared in front of his examiners, how they’ll move to the island this summer for his practice—what a lovely summer it will be, they must have imagined. And as they approach their house by the bay, I see Eliza hanging wash on the line in the backyard, Juba peeling carrots in the kitchen, and Minerva jostling baby Hasell in the upstairs bedroom, shooshing him to sleep so she can set him in his crib and finish beating the rugs clean before Susan and Hasell return. There are Susan and Hasell’s feet on the stones outside the house now, their idle chatter, the rise and fall of their voices that Minerva would have come to recognize from afar, hustling to ready the house, prepare for their approach, tend to their needs, maybe hiding whatever she was working on for herself or her children, or quieting her daughter, two year old Cecilia if she was fussing or playing too loudly. I see Susan and Hasell approach the house. And I feel a darker sense of trepidation, wondering if he performed experiments on Minerva, Eliza, and Juba, in addition to those people on whom he experimented at the medical college.