Biomedical knowledge should always be considered in its socio-historical context, as social factors cannot be divorced from science. 1/ 10

Through much of the 19th and early 20th centuries, medical experiments were performed on vulnerable populations including the infamous Tuskegee University-affiliated investigation concerning "Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male" and those carried out by the Third Reich 2 / 10

François Bernier introduced “race” in 1684 novel “New Division of Earth by the Different Species of Races which Inhabit it” when he contends that "[Humans] differ so clearly that people who have traveled widely can thus often distinguish unerringly one nation from another" 3 / 10

In the late 19th century, the work of comparative anatomist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach gained posthumous appreciation. Blumenbach proposed that Europeans were the original "racial type" that all other races degenerated from.
4 / 10

But in this modern age, surely objective scales would prove useful to the unbiased practice of medicine? As it turns out, these measures are not free from bias, either. In an interview with the Atlantic, author Lundy Braun describes the origin of the spirometer. 5 / 10

Samuel Cartwright was a 19th-century physician and plantation owner, and the first person to use the spirometer to compare pulmonary capacity between black slaves with whites. 6 / 10

Cartwright held that "the [lesser] development of lung tissue & accessory muscles of respiration among the negroes than for whites" proved a justification for slavery insofar that it forced labour increased the fitness of African Americans. 7 / 10

As a result, the spirometer was created with a racial correction factor to decrease the value among African Americans. Braun explains that "the problem here is the survival of the framework of innate racial difference." 8 / 10

Race, insofar as it was historically conceived to 'unerringly' delineate categorical differences between people of differing continental origins, should be discarded outright. 9 / 10

Biomedical knowledge should always be considered in its socio-historical context, as social factors cannot be divorced from science. 10 / 10