[3] Washington's work helped lead to the American Medical Association's apology to the nation’s black physicians in 2008 and the removal of the James Marion Sims statue from Central Park in 2018.

Harriet Washington argues that "diverse forms of racial discrimination have shaped both the relationship between white physicians and black patients and the attitude of the latter towards modern medicine in general".

One of the most infamous examples Washington describes is James Marion Sims, a doctor from South Carolina often considered the "father of gynecology".

He also put the women through painful surgeries without giving them anesthesia and Washington writes, "he claimed that his procedures were 'not painful enough to justify the trouble and risk of attending the administration,' but this claim rings hollow when one learns that Sims always administered anesthesia when he performed the perfected surgery to repair the vaginas of white women in Montgomery a few years later.

Laws in some states allowed medical schools to use the remains of those at the bottom of society's hierarchy—the unclaimed bodies of poor persons and residents of almshouses, and those buried in potter's fields for anatomical study.

[21] The revelation that physicians and medical students were illegally digging up bodies for dissection from the burial ground precipitated the 1788 Doctors' Riot.

[23] A public outcry ensued after newspapers broke the story in 1972, and Senator Edward Kennedy called Congressional hearings and the CDC and PHS appointed an ad hoc advisory panel to review the study.

[28] Washington discusses reproductive rights, including the development of contraception and forced sterilization, and their connection to unethical medical experiments and scientific racism.

Washington describes the development of contraceptive technologies including the birth control pill, Norplant, and Depo-Provera, which were initially tested on women in Mexico, Africa, Brazil, Puerto Rico, and India, and then were first administered in neighborhoods in the U.S. that were mainly African American and Hispanic.

Thus, the immediately postapproval use of contraceptive methods in large numbers of closely monitored poor women of color constituted a final testing arm, so that they were unwittling participating in a research study...In patterns too consistent to be accidental, reproductive drug testing makes poor women of color, at home and abroad, bear the brunt of any health risks that emerge.

Famous cases Washington describes include the Relf sisters, who were 12 and 14 when they were sterilized without their consent in 1973, and Fannie Lou Hammer, whose receipt of a hysterectomy while unconscious was what spurred her to become a civil rights activist.

It is most common in people from the Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and West African regions due to its protection against specific strains of malaria.

However, misconceptions in the U.S. that only people of African descent carried the gene led to the widespread belief that it was a racial condition and to the labeling of it as "a black disease".

[37] Washington details tests done as part of MKNAOMI on unknowing American citizens by the U.S. government in the 1950s through 1970s to develop weapons for biological warfare.

She discusses tests where the government released swarms of mosquitos into predominately black neighborhoods with the intention of seeing if they could be used to spread yellow fever and other infectious diseases.

In their starred review, Publisher's Weekly wrote "Washington is a great storyteller, and in addition to giving us an abundance of information on "scientific racism," the book, even at its most distressing, is compulsively readable".

[45] For The New York Times, Denise Grady was more mixed, writing "[s]ome of Washington's arguments are less convincing than others", but adding, "this is an important book.

The disgraceful history it details is a reminder that people in power have always been capable of exploiting those they regard as "other," and of finding ways to rationalize even the most atrocious abuse".