BiDil, a heart failure drug for African Americans, emerged five years ago as the first FDA approved drug targeted at a specific racial group. While critical scholarship and the popular media have meticulously detailed the history of BiDil from its inauspicious beginnings as a generic combination drug for the general population to its dramatic resuscitation as a racial medicine, the enthusiastic support shown by some African American interest groups has been too little understood, as has their argument that BiDil was an important response to race‐based health disparities. In this essay, we show how the drugmaker, NitroMed, used the support it had solicited from black advocacy groups and community members to market BiDil as a unique “grassroots” pharmaceutical to the African American community. We go on to situate BiDil, which relied on a domestic, U.S.‐centered conception of race, within the context of the global nature of both race and health disparities. Ironically, the grassroots angle of the BiDil case ultimately obscured the global crisis in health disparities. Furthermore, we argue that the grassroots model initiated by NitroMed should be taken note of, as it marks a potential avenue for the marketing of other drugs in the future.
This essay rethinks the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments in light of a long history of experimentation in plantation geographies of the U.S. South. Turning to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discourses of the New South and to Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute, this essay illuminates the extension of the laboratory life of the plantation into the twentieth century. The focus on personal hygiene at the Tuskegee Institute opened the door for alliances with public health initiatives early on, making the school's student population as well as residents of surrounding counties subjects of intense hygienic surveillance well before the official start of the syphilis study.
This book offers a new history of race and science in the nineteenth century through the lens of early African American literature, visual culture, and performance. Across five chapters, the book traces the experiments of black writers, artists, performers, and largely self-taught scientists who crafted sophisticated critiques of antebellum racial science and its effects on society. Far from rejecting science, these figures linked natural science to both on-the-ground activism and more speculative forms of worldmaking. Routinely excluded from institutions of scientific learning and training, they transformed cultural spaces like the page, the stage, the parlor, and even the pulpit into laboratories of knowledge and experimentation. From the recovery of neglected figures like Robert Benjamin Lewis, Hosea Easton, and Sarah Mapps Douglass, to new accounts of Martin Delany, Henry Box Brown, and Frederick Douglass, the book seeks to make natural science central to how we understand the origins and development of African American literature.
This essay examines the Scottish poet and physician James Grainger’s 1764 “West-India georgic,” The Sugar-Cane, to chronicle the transformation of the plantation into an ecologically-unique site for experimentation, produced through material processes and imaginaries of British enclosure in the West Indies. Through its cataloguing of Caribbean diseases, natural remedies, and oblique references to medical experiments on the enslaved, The Sugar-Cane offers a powerful articulation of what I call the “experimental plantation,” an enclosed site from which empirical knowledge is produced, extracted, and transplanted from tropicalized lands and bodies. At the same time as the poem registers the enclosure of human and non-human life within the experimental plantation, it also belies an anxiety about the disordering, tropicalizing forces of various “fugitive” species in the Caribbean, including tropical diseases, wild animals, and maroon communities, all of which threaten to dissolve and overtake the enclosed borders of the plantation. In The Sugar-Cane, the image of the plantation as an ecologically-enclosed, protected space of British cultivation and experimentation is revealed to be a fragile colonial fantasy, always on the verge of being “infected” and creolized by indigenous plants, animals and diseases, as well as by Africans both within and outside of the enclosures of the plantation.
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