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Erasing Blackness From Bioethics

February is Black History Month and so healthcare practitioners will soon rummage history books for information about famous African Americans, like Onesimus (fl. 1709–1720), the African slave who taught his erudite master, Cotton Mather, BA, MA, (1662–1728), about inoculation. Onesimus’s tutelage of Mather did more than suggest the idea of smallpox inoculation to the American colonists, it challenged their conception of “savage” black slaves becoming enlightened by their “civilized” white Christian masters (Koo 2007). If bioethicists turn to standard histories of their field (Evans 2012; Jonsen 1998; Rothman 1991) for information about influential Blacks, like Onesimus, they will find tales of white whistleblowers ending white researchers’ exploitation of functionally illiterate Blacks, but nothing challenging this narrative of white men saving black and female victims; nothing about female heroines or black whistleblowers; nothing about the African Americans who created foundational documents protecting patients’ rights. A more complete history would recognize that bioethics originated as a moral insurrection initiated by female bureaucrats and black civil rights activists protesting the derogation and exploitation of patients and research subjects by scientistic paternalist physicians, medical researchers, and healthcare institutions (Baker 2002, 2019). Female white FDA bureaucrat Frances Kelsey, PhD, MD (1914–2015) is famous for saving American newborns from a thalidomide tragedy, but her role in successfully inserting an informed consent requirement into the 1962 Kefauver-Harris Act is barely mentioned in standard histories of bioethics. As Kelsey recalls this feat,