Abstract
Western medicine has an unfortunate history where it has been applied to address the health of African Americans. At its origins, it was aligned with the objectives of colonialism and chattel slavery. The degree to which medical “science” concerned itself with persons of African descent was to keep them alive for sale on the auction block, or to keep them healthy as they toiled to generate wealth for their European owners. Medicine in early America relied upon both dead and live African bodies to test its ideas to benefit Europeans. As medicine moved from quackery to a discipline based in science, its understanding of human biological variation was flawed. This was not a problem confined to medicine alone, but to the biological sciences in general. Biology had no solid theoretical basis until after 1859. As medicine further developed in the 20th century, it never doubted the difference between Europeans and Africans, and also asserted the innate inferiority of the latter. The genomic revolution in the latter 20th century produced tools that were deployed in a biomedical culture still mired in “racial” medicine. This lack of theoretical perspective still misdirects research associated with health disparity. In contrast to this is evolutionary medicine, which relies on a sound unification of evolutionary (ultimate) and physiological, cellular, and molecular (proximate) mechanisms. Utilizing the perspectives of evolutionary medicine is a prerequisite for an effective intervention in health disparity and finally dispelling the myth of the genetically sick African.
Highlights
In 1769, Dr Joseph Lewis, the personal physician to Dartmouth’s president EleazarWheelock, peeled the skin from a deceased enslaved man named Cato
Utilizing the perspectives of evolutionary medicine is a prerequisite for an effective intervention in health disparity and dispelling the myth of the genetically sick African
The degree that colonial medicine was concerned with persons of African descent was in so far as they could be tools to help heal persons of European descent, or from the same perspective as that of veterinarians taking care of domestic animals
Summary
In 1769, Dr Joseph Lewis, the personal physician to Dartmouth’s president Eleazar. Wheelock, peeled the skin from a deceased enslaved man named Cato. Linnaeus named four varieties of humans, and considered Homo sapiens afer, the least capable of these mentally Another scientific claim concerning the enslaved Africans is that they were more physiologically suited to hard labor in the subtropical climates of the southernmost English colonies compared to Europeans (Derickson 2019). In the former case, while persons whose ancestors evolved in tropical climates were more capable of hard labor in subtropical climates than people who ancestors evolved in northern temperate climates, this was not a justification for enslaving them and for making them work beyond anyone’s physical limits This strange logic viewed the tropical adaptation of Africans as a mark of inferiority. Modern medicine has still not completely escaped the principles of racial difference that Cartwright established In his 1851 “Report on the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race”, he complained about the lack of attention paid to race by northern and southern medical educators. Worse was the fact that several of the claims of human difference that the authors of the 2016 paper thought were true, were false (Graves 2021)
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