Night Doctors

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“To discourage slaves from meeting or escaping, slave owners told tales of gruesome research done on black bodies, then covered themselves in white sheets and crept around at night, posing as spirits coming to infect black people with disease or steal them for research” (Skloot 166). The issue of race and discrimination in the book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is prevalent throughout. However, the issue of night doctors is only represented in one chapter when it is clear that it is one of the most disturbing topics in the book. Night doctors are also known as night riders, night watchers and Ku Klux doctors, and are described as the “bogeymen” of African American culture. Rebecca Skloot discusses how even though most believed …show more content…
Bobbette says, “You’d be surprised how many people disappeared in East Baltimore when I was a girl. I’m telling you, I lived here in the fifties when they got Henrietta, and we weren’t allowed to go anywhere near Hopkins. When it got dark and we were young, we had to be on the steps, or Hopkins might get us” (Skloot 165). It is terrible that African Americans had to live that way in constant fear that they would be snatched off the streets and tortured for testing just because they were too uneducated to process what was really to be done with them. Night Doctors were known to lie to blacks on the streets and tell them that if they complied, they would receive treatments and cures for any diseases they had. This was not the case, and truthfully, most were operated on without anesthesia and left there to die once the doctors were done with them.
During that time, night doctors didn’t care about blacks because they believed they were superior to them and had the right to treat them like lab rats. They compensated for these actions by stating that they were doing it for the “greater good” of society. There should be no excuse for the actions done by night doctors no matter how many people were helped by the medical advances that resulted. It is important that more people become aware of the inhumane things
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