"The oral histories of medical abuse voiced by African Americans are often dismissed as mythological, but without objective proof of this label. African Americans' personal stories and familial histories of abuse have rarely surfaced in the medical literature, or in the popular literature. This is not surprising, because African Americans were not well represented in these canons until fairly recently.
Why should we give the physicians' medical narratives more credence than the numerous contentions of slaves, sharecroppers, and contemporary African Americans that they have been subjected to abusive medical research? Until now, the discussion has suffered greatly from our Western literary bias, which encourages us to believe planters' and physicians' writings about the health and medical issues of African Americans, but to give insufficient weight to a rich oral history passed down by African Americans, a history that has preserved the memory of medical abuses.
We quite logically see medical authority to medical experts, but this book will illustrate how race, culture, and economics have trumped medical and scientific truths at every turn. It will make the case that physicians had every motive to skew narratives against their Black subjects, not because they were especially racist or unfair (although many were) but because the culture of American medicine has mirrored the larger culture that encompassed enslavement, segregation, and less dramatic forms of racial inequity.
The bias against African American medical narratives emanates from culture and politics, including the Western literary bias against oral history."
Introduction- Medical Apartheid, Harriet A. Washington
(i.e., we told each other what happened and passed it down, and it was seen as stories and not a History)
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