Chapter 21: Night Doctors
Sources for information about night doctors and the history of black Americans and medical
research include Night Riders in Black Folk History, by Gladys-Marie Fry; T. L. Savitt, “The
Use of Blacks for Medical Experimentation and Demonstration in the Old South,” Journal of
Southern History 48, no. 3 (August 1982); Medicine and Slavery: The Disease and Health
Care of Blacks in Antebellum Virginia; F. C. Waite, “Grave Robbing in New England,” Medical
Library Association Bulletin (1945); W. M. Cobb, “Surgery and the Negro Physician: Some
Parallels in Background,“ Journal of the National Medical Association (May 1951); V. N.
Gamble, “A Legacy of Distrust: African Americans and Medical Research,” American Journal
of Preventive Medicine 9 (1993); V. N. Gamble, “Under the Shadow of Tuskegee: African
Americans and Health Care,” American Journal of Public Health 87, no. 11 (November 1997).
For the most detailed and accessible account available, see Harriet Washington’s Medical
Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial
Times to the Present.
For the history of Hopkins, see notes for chapter 1.
For documents and other materials relating to the 1969 ACLU lawsuit over Hopkins’s re-
search into a genetic predisposition to criminal activity, see Jay Katz’s Experimentation with
Human Beings, chapter titled “Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine: A Chronicle.
Story of Criminal Gene Research.” For further reading, see Harriet Washington, “Born for
Evil?” in Roelcke and Maio, Twentieth Century Ethics of Human Subjects Research (2004).
Sources for the Hopkins lead-study story include court documents and Health and Human
Services records, as well as an interview with a source connected to the case, Ericka Grimes
v. Kennedy Kreiger Institute, Inc. (24-C-99–925 and 24-C-95–66067/CL 193461). See also L.
M. Kopelman, “Children as Research Subjects: Moral Disputes, Regulatory Guidance and Re-
cent Court Decisions,” Mount Sinai Medical Journal (May 2006); and J. Pollak, “The Lead-
Based Paint Abatement Repair & Maintenance Study in Baltimore: Historic Framework and
Study Design,” Journal of Health Care Law and Policy (2002).