MENGELAMERICANS From an interview with Harriet Washington, author of Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present: "James Marion Sims was a very important surgeon from Alabama, and all of his medical experimentation took place with slaves. He took the skulls of … young black children—only black children—and he opened their heads and moved around the bones of the skull to see what would happen, posited as a cure for disease, but there was no rationale for that. … And after this, he went north … he was elected the president of the American Medical Association."