The Dark History of White Medicine
As I was reading about the lobotomy (pseudo or not) performed on the narrator in Chapter 11, I was reminded of the brutal history and relation between white doctors and black people, specifically female slaves. The chapter begins with the narrator being forced to swallow an unknown medicine. After losing consciousness, he wakes to white doctors and nurses surrounding him as he undergoes a series of electrical shocks. As the shocks are being administered, one of the doctors argues that these primitive methods would not be used on someone that, “were a New Englander with a Harvard background?” (236). They are rebutted by another doctor that claims the narrator will, “experience no major conflict of motives, and what is even better, society will suffer no traumata on his account” (236). Another doctor adds, “Why not castration, doctor?” (236). The doctors continue to call the narrator “boy” and laugh at his suffering, exclaiming, “They really d...