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The Night Doctors
| Article
# : |
11505 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1986 |
5,406 Words |
| Author
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Gladys-Marie Fry
Folklorist Gladys-Marie Fry teaches at the University of
Maryland in College Park. The original version of this article
appeared in Missing Pieces: Georgia Folk Art 1770-1976,
published by the George Council for the Arts and Humanities. |
The Tuskegee Study, initiated by the Public Heath Service in 1932 on 600 poor, uneducated, black men from rural Alabama, touched off a wave of controversy and indignation thirty years later. The purpose of this now-celebrated study was to determine the effects of syphilis on the human body. The exposure of this medical project gave authenticity to a conviction long held among black folk: that blacks have been used as subjects for medical experimentation.
In 1938 Helen Louise Taylor had written of the black community in New Castle, Delaware, in the Journal of American Folklore: [They] have a strong distrust of doctors. They believe that if they enter a doctor's house they will never come out alive. During the days of slavery, they believed that if they wandered out of bounds of their master's place at night, they would never be seen again because the "night doctors" would get them.
The disappearance of over twenty-five young men and boys in Atlanta, Georgia, beginning in 1979, led to the reappearance of the night-doctor legend in the black community. Many thought that these victims were deliberately murdered so that their sexual organs could be used to manufacture aphrodisiacs.
Belief in night doctors dates back to slavery times. Furthermore, many blacks believe that Southern landowners actively fostered a fear of night doctors in the post-Reconstruction period in order to discourage the migration of black people from rural farming areas of the South to the urban centers of both the North and South.
The term 'night doctor', derived from the perception that victims were sought only at night, applied to both students of medicine who supposedly stole cadavers to learn about physiological processes and professional thieves who sold stolen bodies - living and dead - to physicians for medical research. Night doctors were also known as "student doctors" (referring specifically to apprentice physicians), "Ku Klux doctors," "night witches," and "night riders."
The period of the night-doctors scale coincides with the great migration of blacks to industrial centers, which lasted from about 1880 to the end of World War I. The outbreak of the war and the curtailment of immigrant labor from abroad created a severe labor shortage in northern industrial centers. Not only were few laborers coming in from abroad, but thousands already established in the United States went back to their native
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