How Racism Limits Black Health

Racism within the healthcare system can not only impact patients, but even traumatize the Black women that work within it.  Black Womens Healthcare Trauma  To understand Black women’s complicated relationship within the healthcare system, we have to unpack the history of trauma and indifference linked to it.& The most notable example of medical trauma and indifference is the case of three enslaved women who lived in Alabama: Anarcha, Lucy and Betsey. Father of Modern Gynecology Dr. Marion Sims experimented on them without anesthesia (despite it being available at the time) under the belief that Black people felt less pain than white people. A racist idea that was so prevalent that it remained in the nursing textbook “Nursing: A Concept-Based Approach to Learning,” until 2017 when it was pulled by its publisher Pearson and remains throughout the modern healthcare system. Lucy was the first to be operated on, in a surgery that took an hour and was described as agonizing for Lucy. Due to Dr. Sims using a sponge to watch away urine from her bladder, Lucy developed blood poisoning that it took two to three months for her to recover from. Anarcha, who was 17 at the time the surgeries...