Plantation Experiments
Trigger Warning: this lesson contains references to violence and sexual violence
Welcome to Sociology Level 2, Lesson 8: Plantation Experiments
If you haven’t studied the treatment of Black people on plantations before, check out our Level 1 Sociology lesson “On the Plantation...”
In this lesson, you will learn about:
Medical experimentation on captives
The types of experiments that were performed
The development of certain medicines and treatments
The medical tools used in experiments
Primary Objectives
By the end of this lesson, you will understand:
Who performed experiments on the enslaved
What Thomas Jefferson did to his captives
Who James Marion Sims was
What James Marion Sims is famous for
What Sims did to children and women
Additional Objectives
By the end of this lesson, you may understand:
How Thomas Jefferson developed a vaccine for smallpox
How John Harden furthered anatomical knowledge
What Sims believed about tetanus and Black babies
What pseudoscience Sims was a firm believer in
How Sims developed the science of gynaecology
How Europeans perfected C-sections and which African country could already perform C-sections
How the effects of ether were tested
Enslavement could not have existed nor persisted without European medical science. The enslaved fed the medical research and training sectors of Europe and the Americas. Due to the trifecta of European, Indigenous American and African life, American plantations were home to a myriad of diseases. Medical experimentation was therefore rife.
In 1700, Britain’s US colonies had approximately 20,000 enslaved Africans. By 1776, there were 550,000 - 20% of the US population. This meant that a huge volume of captives were experimented on. Planters would often lease or sell their captives to doctors for their experiments. Some plantation owners were medically trained, and would use the enslaved as guinea pigs in order to develop treatments for white people.
For example, Dr. Thomas Hamilton of Georgia became a wealthy plantation owner in the 19th century. He experimented on his slaves, practicing on an enslaved African man named John Brown. Hamilton made Brown sit in a deep, muddy pit heated with fire, attempting to find the perfect heat remedy for sunstroke. Brown would undergo various experiments daily, often fainting while experimented upon.
Thomas Jefferson, one of the US Founding Fathers, also experimented on his captives. Jefferson obtained cowpox, a zoonotic variation of the smallpox virus, from the blood of dead cattle and forcibly injected 200 enslaved Africans with it. He then injected live smallpox into the recently vaccinated captives to see if they had developed immunity to the disease. Jefferson, along with Edward Jenner, pioneered the smallpox vaccine through forced experimentation on Black bodies.
John Harden stripped the blood vessels of what he described as “a Negro and three hogs”, measuring their widths to determine the “relative areas of the Trunks and Branches of arteries”. This furthered anatomical knowledge and enabled the development of blood vessel diagrams that are used in schools and universities today.
James Marion Sims was a plantation doctor who performed numerous experiments on Black people. He is known as the father of gynaecology, and had a statue dedicated to him in Central Park, New York City until 2018. During the 19th century, Sims used Black infants as research subjects when looking at tetanus. He was convinced that the convulsions and muscle spasms associated with tetanus were due to malformations of the skull, not due to chronic malnutrition as is known today.
Sims would take a sick Black baby from their mother and make incisions in the scalp. He would then wield a cobbler’s tool (a hammer and knife that are used to make shoes) to pry the skull bones into new positions, often puncturing the scalp. All of this was done while the baby was still conscious, crying out for its mother until death.
These attempts to open the skull were based on the pseudoscience of phrenology. Sims believed the myth that Black people had smaller skulls compared to whites. He hypothesised that Black skulls formed quicker, stunting brain growth and cognitive development, thus causing intellectual inferiority. When the babies died, Sims refused to take the blame, and instead blamed the sloth and ignorance of the mothers for their deaths! He soon acquired 17 slaves which he used repeatedly for his experiments and surgeries.
In 1845, an enslaved Black woman called Anarcha gave birth to a child. Sims was the attending doctor. Due to the birth, Anarcha’s vagina had been torn, giving her vesicovaginal fistula. This medical condition is a tear between the bladder wall and vagina, causing infection and involuntary urination.
Sims decided to develop a method for treating this disease, and acquired 11 enslaved women with the disease. He conducted experiments on them for 4 years. He developed a speculum, which is an instrument designed to open orifices. His speculum was made from metal and sharpened at the ends, and was used to open the women’s vaginas in full. He would scar the edges of vaginal tears then close them with sutures (surgical stitches).
Other doctors would restrain the women while he did this, as no anaesthetic was administered. Sims stated that the procedure was not painful enough to justify its use, and that Black people did not feel pain anyway. Once he perfected this surgical treatment on the enslaved, he began to use it on white women, who he routinely anaesthetised. After their surgeries, Sims also got Black women addicted to opium, explaining it calmed their nerves and relieved the scalding pain of urination.
Dr. Francois Marie Prevost of Louisiana also used enslaved Black women to perfect caesarean sections, and many other experiments such as ovary removal and bladder stone removal were perfected on the enslaved via routine experimentation. Interestingly, at this time Africans were already able to perform C-sections, with documented evidence coming from European travellers in the Kingdom of Buganda (Uganda today).
Doctors wouldn’t just experiment on captives they had purchased. Often they would seize Black people from the streets to experiment on - whether enslaved or free. In 1839 in South Carolina, the effects of ether, an anaesthetic, were tested on Black people. A 19th century textbook on the history of anaesthesia tells the story of a group of doctors seizing a Black boy on the streets. They forced him to inhale ether from a handkerchief, holding it over his mouth and nose. As he became motionless, the doctors assumed they had killed the boy, but an hour later he regained consciousness. After forced experimentation like this, ether became commonly used in hospitals.
Black bodies were experimented upon extensively during the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, as they were seen as a disposable way for testing out new methods of treatment and new cures for sickness. The usage of Black people as lab rats continued throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, and many doctors and scientists today still believe that Black bodies are suited to experimentation.
Further Reading:
Medical Apartheid, Harriet A. Washington