"The consistent display of Black patients as mere disease exemplars also blunted physicians' compassion. The result of exploiting the "clinical material" was a damping of sensitivity and altruism towards Black patients, and this became an important but unacknowledged part of a physician's training.
One powerful illustration of this process is found in the touching November 1846 memoirs of the newly minted Dr. Pray. He recounted how during his first anatomical dissection he had filled in overwhelming sympathy for the fate of the young girl under his scalpel. "Today are subject, a poor Negro girl, was brought up. Poor, despised and disregarded African, degraded and despised in life you are to be made a spectacle of and subject of ridicule and obscene jest even in death." Yet, under professional pressure, he immediately launched into a detailed public surgical dissection of the girl's labia.
A year later, the same doctor laughingly wrote of his antics the night before, when he had delighted in making a group of white women of his own social class scream in horror. How? By frightening them with "a piece of dead nigar" that he has saved from the dissecting table.
...Students such as the young George Pray were likely to be the most idealistic of caregivers, but they were also the most vulnerable to professional repercussions should they offend professors. They could not afford to criticize instructors, even obliquely, by suggesting that the clinical material should be treated as sensitively as white private patients. Eventually, students absorbed the racist values that informed their education at every turn."
Chapter 4- Medical Apartheid, Harriet A. Washington
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