Medicine’s dark history exposes how white people have benefitted from the exploitation of Black people. It also helps explain why black mothers are dying at alarming rates.

Reflect on these big-idea questions before you watch the video. Then revisit them after you finish the video. Notice if any of your responses change.

• What has been your experience with receiving quality healthcare?
• What do you know about the history of racial inequity and mistreatment of Black, Indigenous, and people of color in the medical system?

The U.S. Medical System is Still Haunted by Slavery

As the high rates of maternal mortality in the US continue to concern researchers, a new ProPublica report digs into one factor in this alarming trend. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, black mothers giving birth in the US die at three to four times the rate of white mothers. That’s one of the widest racial disparities in medicine today.

While many of the inequalities in medicine can be attributed to economic factors like access to good health care, studies have shown minority patients tend to receive a lower quality of care than non-minorities, even when they have the same types of health insurance and the same ability to pay for care.

So how do we better understand this divide? History is usually a good place to start. In this installment of Vox and ProPublica’s collaboration, we lay out some of the dark history of race and women’s medicine. We go back to the painful experimentation on slaves for medical science — particularly by one doctor named J. Marion Sims. Sims was known as the “father of modern gynecology,” and his statue stands in Central Park, across from the New York Academy of Medicine. The vestiges of abuse continue to haunt the medical system, and give context to current racial disparities.

After watching this video. consider the following questions:

• How was medicine and science used to justify perceptions of superiority of white people and disregard for the humanity of Black people?
• How have Black people been used for medical experimentation and received lower quality of care throughout history and present-day? What are some examples?What benefits were people of your race provided or denied through institutional racism in medicine?
• How does this relate to the experiences and disproportionate mortality rate people of color experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic?
• What actions should doctors, medical professionals, and everyday people take to uncover bias and inequity in the medical system?