The Unspeakable Terror : Medical Exploitation on African and Indigenous Bodies

Abstract

Medical experimentation is a prominent tool used to perpetuate Euro-centric hegemonic ideologies by utilizing the bodies of innocent black and indigenous men and women who were enslaved or captured by European colonizers. This project aims to analyze how medical exploitation on black and indigenous bodies have illustrated a shattered relationship between medicine and marginalized communities as well as evaluating ethical resistance towards these experiments. Throughout the research, the use of library resources from multiple, credible journals, and books were vital methodologies to investigate medical exploitation and how it has permeated in the global South for decades. In many of the resources such as journals of medicine and humanities, prompted information on how scientific knowledge was dependent on the misuse of colonized bodies in order to cultivate white hegemony in medicine that has intentional excluded the colonized. The results in the project promulgated how experiments had shifted the perception on medicine and health and its relationship with to those who are descendants from the global South, and who are reluctant in embracing western medicine. Because of the reluctance, countries have found it difficult to contain illnesses that have ravaged the most vulnerable communities. The centuries of medical exploitation hinders unity between western medicine and the marginalized, so many have turned to utilizing traditional medicine as an alternative to western medicine as well as an definite act of self-preservation that leads to decolonizing medicine in the global South. While it may take some time for reconciliation in the global South to trust medicine such as granting secure access to effective medications, it is still brings the complex issue on trust in the health system to allow the use of traditional medicine. Although western medicine has advance diagnosis in detecting and treating diseases, traditional medicine into the scientific field can push for an adopting an anti-racist and decolonial practices that includes the perspective of the global South.