i read about reparations for eugenic sterilization in north carolina over at guerillamamamedicine and cripchick. a snippet from the AP article:

A state House panel recommended the state give $20,000 to victims of the eugenics program, which sterilized about 7,600 people between 1929 and 1975 who were considered to be mentally handicapped or genetically inferior. Though North Carolina and several other states have apologized, none had offered reparations.

“Yes, it is ugly. It’s not something that we’re proud,” said state Rep. Larry Womble, D-Forsyth, who has been working on the issue for several years. “But I’m glad that North Carolina has done more than any other state to step forward and not run away from it.” Lawmakers in the full General Assembly will have to approve the idea. They convene next month.
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North Carolina, however, moved ahead aggressively after the war, conducting about 80 percent of procedures after 1945 and growing the program to be the third largest in the nation, behind only California and Virginia. Most of those sterilized in the 1960s were poor black women. Willis Lynch, 75, of Littleton was one of those sterilized. He went through forced sterilization at the age of 14 — not knowing at the time what was happening — and was later frustrated by it.

i never wanted to be a doctor. i never cared much about the 'science' of the body...i was more concerned about the sociology and psychology of practicing medicine. i have a very particular curiosity for narratives about scientific experimentation and black bodies. this is connected to a more academic interest in the display of african and other 'native' bodies during colonial world fairs. i am most interested in how the treatment of non-white bodies in the medical and scientific world becomes a basis for spatial politics around policing, housing, and labor. i am interested in exploring how the abuse of black bodies is the foundation of many of the 'medical advances' we covet today.

currently, i am reading medical apartheid: the dark history of medical experimentation on black americans from colonial times to the present by harriet a. washington. this is an intriguing text...very dense, but well worth the effort. it helps to synthesize all of my thoughts around bodies and science. in college i did a paper on the human betterment society and the eugenics movement in california. while in cape town in 2005 i wrote about sara baartman and the use of african female bodies. at another point during undergraduate studies i explored issues around forced sterilization and welfare mandates. there is so much out there to excavate and make sense of. when we take all of this, how do we apply it to contemporary initiatives and movements? how do we use this to reflect on how we value and guard our bodies? can we ever trust the medical community?

on the spatial and geography politics of medical experiements. talk about an easily accesible pool of bodies--

However, in other human medical experiments, the recruitment of blacks and the poor is a tacit feature of the study because they recruit subjects from heavily black inner-city areas that tend to surround American teaching hospitals. American university research centers have historically been located in inner-city areas, and accordingly, a disproportionate number of these abuses have involved experiments with African Americans. (p. 6)

on literacy, access to information, discursive monopolies, the guarding of secrets through specialized knowledge, and documenting--

Until three or four decases ago, these researchers were speaking only to their like-minded peers--other whites, usualy male and rarely of the lower classes. They could afford to be frank. Blacks were barred from many medical schools and training programs, and newspaper and magazine reporters rarely read the medical publications perused by specially trained medical men of means. There was very little danger any blacks would read medical accounts, because in antebellum period black literacy was banned by law and illiteracy persisted long beyond slavery. Therefore a doctor could be open about buying slaves for experiments, or locating or moving hospitals to areas where blacks furnished bodies for experimentation and dissection. Public Health Service physician Thomas Murrell could brashly insist in the 1940s, "The future of the Negro lies more in the research laboratory than in the schools...When diseased, he should be registered and forced to take treatment before he offers his diseased mind and body on the alter of academic and professional education." Even more recently, the segregated nature of U.S. medical training emboldened some physicians to speak with candor of misusing balck subjects: "[It was] cheaper to use Niggers than cats because they were everywhere and cheap experimental animals," neurosurgeon Harry Bailey, M.D. reminisced in a 1960s speech he delivered while at Tulane Medical School.
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Even so, this history has been a challenge to document because it has been hidden in plain sight--widely scattered, distortedm and rendered all but unrecognizable as abuse by heavy editorializing. (p.10-11)
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The medical libraries that house these journals have historically been closed to the public and most remain so...Morever, physical access to such journals would constitute only the first hurdle: The medical jargon in which such research papers are couched is often impenetrable even to well-educated nonmedical people. (p.12)

more snippets to come...

i want to dicuss these things with my students next semester. we have a unit on imperialism and i want to incorporate discussions around the marriage of colonialism, slavery, and the medical community.