Human body, Medicine, and Social Values

Both Schienbinger's article "Nature's body: Theories of Gender and Race" and Axelsen's article about Sims's abuse of black women in his experimental procedure exemplifies the influence of social values on how one looks at the human body of different races and genders and vice versa. Schienbinger spends most of the article exploring the research procedure of scientific racism and scientific sexism. Scientific sexism would look at the differences between male and female bodies of Europeans, not other races. Scientific racism would only compare and contrast male samples of varying races. This refusal to overlap race while studying differences in sex and sex while studying differences in races has its roots in the assumption that European males are the ideal human beings, the highest status of humans along the chain of being. This article strongly reminds me of the first pair of articles assigned to the class. 'Scientists' attempted to use the varying parts of the human body, especially males, to prove the superiority of European males to all other groups of people. I am amazed that this article tries to 'explain away' the ease of birthing that african females enjoyed in comparison to european females as a compensation of their small brains and close relation to apes and other 'beasts.'
Aexlsen's article explores the medical procedures of J. Marion Sims and how the social values of his days contributed to his approach to the practice of medicine. I found the article rather lengthy and the information limited in regards to Sims malpractice. This could be due to the fact that there was not much documentation that goes into the actual procedure or Sims's reputation discouraged historians from pointing out his faults in his pioneering surgical techniques. Axelsen tries to justify the way that Sims performed his experimentation by pointing out how his professional expectation and the cultural definitions of his time affected the view he had towards his patients. It seems that the majority of the blame for abuse of minority women must not be placed on Sims himself but the social values that allowed such abuse to occur. In today's world, we talk about animal testing and how animals are not volunteering themselves for lab experimentation. The amount of abuse on women, especially minorities, is hardly heard.