Monthly Archives: August 2017

In the natural course of events, humans fall sick and die. Patients hope for miraculous remedies to restore their health.

We all want our medicines to work for us in wondrous ways. But how are human subjects chosen for experiments? Who bears the burden of risk? What ethical brakes keep scientific enthusiasm from overwhelming vulnerable populations? Who goes first?

Today, the question of underrepresented minorities in medical experimentation is still volatile. Minorities, especially African-Americans in the U.S., tend to be simultaneously underrepresented in medical research and historically exploited in experimentation.

My new book, Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic, zeroes in on human experimentation on Caribbean slave plantations in the late 1700s. Were slaves on New World sugar plantations used as human guinea pigs in the same way African-Americans were in the American South centuries later?

History is littered with exploitative experiments in humans. The Tuskegee syphilis experiment is probably one of the most infamous. From 1932 to 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service offered 600 African-American men food, free medical care and burial insurance for participating in the study. About 400 of these poor Alabamans had syphilis. The government studied the natural progression of the disease until death, even though penicillin was an easy, cheap and safe cure.

This type of medical testing empirical study through controlled trials began in earnest in the late 1700s. Many poor souls were subjected to medical testing. In Europe and its American colonies, drug trials tended to over-select subjects from the poor and wards of the state, such as prisoners, hospital patients and orphans. Most experimental subjects came from the same groups used for dissection that is, persons with no next of kin to insist on burial rites or to pay for expensive cures.

I was surprised to learn that, in many instances, doctors did not as might be expected use slaves as guinea pigs. Slaves were valuable property of powerful masters. The masters will prevailed over a doctors advice.

A British physician in Jamaica reported he had developed a perfect cure for yaws, a horrid tropical infection of the skin, bones and joints bred of poverty and poor sanitation. The experimental treatment was slated to take three or four months. The masters, not caring to lose their Slaves labor for so long, denied the doctors request.

However, numerous slaves were exploited in medical experiments at this time. John Quier, a British doctor working in rural Jamaica, freely experimented with smallpox inoculation in a population of 850 slaves during the 1768 epidemic. Inoculation, a precursor to vaccine, involved inducing a light case of the disease in a healthy person in hopes of immunizing that person for life.

But Quier did not simply inoculate to prevent disease. We see from his reports that he used slaves to explore questions that doctors in Europe dared not. He wanted to know, for example, whether one could safely inoculate menstruating or pregnant women. He also wanted to know if it was safe to inoculate newborn infants or a person already suffering from dropsy, yaws or fever and the like.Quier was employed by slave owners and would have inoculated plantation slaves for smallpox, with or without his scientific experiments. In all instances, masters had the final word. There was no issue of slave consent, or, for that matter, often physician consent.

In his letters to colleagues in London, Quier reported that, to answer these questions, he sometimes inoculated repeatedly in the same person and at his own expense. Throughout his experiments, when pressed, Quier followed what he considered of interest to science and not necessarily what was best for the human being standing in front of him.

The history of human experimentation is not merely about subjects used and misused, but also about subjects excluded from testing and, as a consequence, from the potential benefits of a cure.

Today, medical researchers struggle to include women in clinical trials. Its impossible to say when women were defined out as proper subjects of human research. But women were regularly included in medical research in the 18th century.

In 1721, the iconic Newgate Prison trials in England tested the safety and efficacy of smallpox inoculation. Of the elected six condemned criminals, there were three women and three men, matched as closely as possible for age.

Women also featured in Quiers experiments, raising explosive questions about differences among women, many of which were about race.

For example, his London colleagues wondered whether his smallpox experiments done on Negro women were valid for English women. Some gentlemen in London were concerned that experiments done on slave women were not valid for women of fashion, and of delicate constitutions. Treatments appropriate for enslaved women, they warned, might well destroy ladies of delicate habits, educated in European luxury.

African, Amerindian and European knowledges mixed on Caribbean sugar plantations.

Europeans had little experience with the tropical disease they encountered in the Caribbean, but Africans did. One of my purposes in this book is to expand our knowledge of African contributions to science.

An extraordinary experiment in 1773 pitted purported slave cures against European treatments in Grenada, a small island south of Barbados. In something of a cure-off, a slaves remedy for yaws was tested against the standard European remedy. Under the masters careful eye, four slaves were treated by a European-trained surgeon, two by the slave doctor.

The surgeon employed a standard mercurial treatment, which, when taken over several years, tended to leave slaves health broken. Meanwhile, the slave set to work with methods learned in his own Country (presumably Africa). This consisted of sweating his patients powerfully twice a day in a cask with a small fire and by giving them a medicine made from two woods, known locally as Bois Royale and Bois fer.

The outcome? The slaves patients were cured within a fortnight; the surgeons patients were not. The plantation owner, a man of science, consequently put the man of African origins in charge of all yaws patients in his plantation hospital. In the process, the enslaved man who remained nameless and faceless throughout was elevated in status to a Negro Dr.

The Atlantic world represents a step in globalization, the potential enrichment of the human experience when worlds collide. But the extinction of peoples, such as the Amerindians in the Greater Antilles, coupled with the fear and secrecy bred in the enslavement of Africans, meant that knowledge did not circulate freely. Amerindians and enslaved Africans strategically held many secrets. Though hidden or suppressed, much of this knowledge can still be found today in local Caribbean remedies.

Bertrand Bajon, a French physician working in Cayenne, envied the numerous plant cures known to Indians and Negroes. Bajon pleaded that for the good of humanity slaves be obliged to communicate the plants he [or she] used and the manner in which they are employed. In return, Bajon recommended the slave be offered freedom but not until a great number of experiments confirmed the cures virtue.

We must remember that knowledge created in this period did not respond to science for its own sake, but was fired in the colonial crucible of conquest, slavery and violence.

Londa Schiebinger, Professor of History of Science, Stanford University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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August 20, 2017 4:55 PM By Justin Udo

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) A trip to the Caribbean without taking a step outside the Delaware Valley.

Music, dancing, crafts, and clothing all played a major part at the 31st Annual Philadelphia Caribbean Festival on Sunday at Penns Landing, but for many its the food that stole the show.

We have our special, wonderful jerked chicken, then we have a special rice and peas with ox tails, curry goat, curry chicken, a lovely macaroni pie, and also a wonderful bacon salt fish, said one food vendor, showing off their menu.

A food vendor at the Caribbean Festival. (credit: Justin Udo)

Many of the people who came say the Caribbean atmosphere and warm tempertatures almost made them forget where they were.

You can take a vacation without leaving the Philadelphia area. Its free festive fun, said one attendee.

(credit: Justin Udo)

Festival-goers say its a great educational experience on Caribbean places like Jamaica, Barbados, Grenada, and Hondorus.

Its a beautiful thing. Me personally, I always love learning about different cultures, said another attendee.

Money raised from the event goes to a scholarship fund benefiting Caribbean american students perusing higher education.

Justin Udo is a reporter and editor at KYW Newsradio 1060. He got his start in radio as an intern at his hometown CBS station, KDKA in Pittsburgh. He first came on board KYW Newsradio in 2009, working as a desk assistant, service aide,...

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A Taste Of The Caribbean In Philadelphia - CBS Philly

August 20, 2017

The remnants of former Tropical Storm Harvey will continue to track westwardthrough the Caribbean Sea and possibly into the Bay of Campeche where a regeneration of the system could occur this week.

Hostile winds aloft shredded Harvey apart on Saturday, and the National Hurricane Center issued its final advisory.

(MORE: Hurricane Central)

What is left of Harveyis a cluster ofshower and thunderstorm activity to the south of Jamaica, which became more concentrated Sunday afternoon.

However, ahurricane hunter aircraft investigated the remnants of Harvey Sunday afternoon and found that the system hadn'tregenerated into a tropical depression or tropical storm because it lackeda well-defined center of circulation, and there was also no indication of tropical-storm-force winds.

Through Monday, Harvey is forecast to enter the western Caribbean where conditions could be somewhat conducive for the gradual reorganization of the system as it moves west-northwestward.

Heavy rain from this system could cause flooding in Central America and the Yucatan Peninsula by Monday or Tuesday regardless of whether Harvey can reform prior to reaching those land areas.

By the middle portion of this week, Harvey's remnants may move into the Bay of Campeche (southwest Gulf of Mexico) where they will have to be monitored closely. Some forecast guidance suggests Harvey could reform over this region even if it doesn't get its act together prior to reaching Central America and the Yucatan.

Residents and visitors in eastern Mexico and south Texas should continue to follow the progress of Harvey's remnants, as uncertainty remains with forecast details.

Invest 92L continues tofesterto the north of the Lesser Antilles.

Wind shear has chipped away at 92L's structure and overall development chances. Hostile wind sheartypically rips apart tropical disturbances and weaker tropical cyclones.

We will continue to monitor the progress of Invest 92L as it moves west-northwestward during the next several days in the general direction of the Bahamas, but overall, development chances are low.

This system will enhance rainfall chances in the Bahamas, as well as much ofFlorida, early this week.

It may eventually interact with a cold front near Florida by later this week, and that's when we'll keep a close eye on it for any potential increase in organization.

Finally,a tropical wave in the central Atlantic Ocean is not expected todevelop, but we will watch it over the next several days. Its future trackis expected to be northwestward into the open Atlantic Ocean.

We are in the climatological peak of the hurricane season, so each tropical wave or area of low pressure in the Atlantic Basin must be watched closely for development.

(MORE: Where Every U.S. Landfalling Hurricane Began Its Journey)

Now is a good time to make sure you have a plan in case of a hurricane strike. The Federal Alliance for Safe Homes has an excellent website to help you make your plan.

Check back with weather.com for updates in the days ahead on these latest systems and the rest of hurricane season.

(MORE: NOAA Predicts Active Rest of the Hurricane Season)

The Weather Companys primary journalistic mission is to report on breaking weather news, the environment and the importance of science to our lives. This story does not necessarily represent the position of our parent company, IBM.

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Harvey Could Rebound in the Western Caribbean; Two Other Areas Are Being Monitored For Tropical Development - Wunderground.com (blog)