Displays at Sawyer: February 2025 - Black History Medicine

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer, yet her cells--taken without her knowledge--became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first "immortal" human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer and viruses; helped lead to in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions. Yet Henrietta Lacks is buried in an unmarked grave. Her family did not learn of her "immortality" until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. The story of the Lacks family is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of

The rousing, captivating story of a Black physician, her career in medicine, and the deep inequities that still exist in the U.S. healthcare system Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, it never occurred to Uché Blackstock and her twin sister, Oni, that they would be anything but physicians. In the 1980s, their mother headed an organization of Black women physicians, and for years the girls watched these fiercely intelligent women in white coats tend to their patients and neighbors, host community health fairs, cure ills, and save lives. What Dr. Uché Blackstock did not understand as a child-or learn about at Harvard Medical School, where she and her sister had followed in their mother's footsteps, making them the first Black mother-daughter legacies from the school-were the profound and long-standing systemic inequities that mean just 2 percent of all U.S. physicians today are Black women; the racist practices and policies that ensure Black Americans have far worse health outcomes than any other group in the country; and the flawed system that endangers the well-being of communities like theirs. As an ER physician, and later as a professor in academic medicine, Dr. Blackstock became profoundly aware of the systemic barriers that Black patients and physicians continue to face. Legacy is a journey through the critical intersection of racism and healthcare. At once a searing indictment of our healthcare system, a generational family memoir, and a call to action, Legacy is Dr. Blackstock's odyssey from child to medical student to practicing physician-to finally seizing her own power as a health equity advocate against the backdrop of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement.

No complete history of black women physicians in the US exists, and what little mention is made of these women in existing histories is often insubstantial or altogether incorrect. In this work of extensive research, Jasmine Brown offers a champions a new history, penning the long-erased stories of nine pioneering black women physicians beginning in 1860, when a black woman first entered medical school. The legacy of black women physicians, began with Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler, who graduated from medical school only fourteen months after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, moved to Richmond, Virginia, and provided medical care for the newly freed slaves who had been neglected and exploited by the medical system. Brown tells the stories of women such as Dr. Edith Irby Jones, the first African American to attend a previously white-only medical school in the Jim Crow South, where she was not allowed to eat lunch with her classmates or use the women's bathroom. Still, Dr. Irby Jones persisted and graduated from medical school, going on to directly inspire other, like Dr. Joycelyn Elders, who, after meeting Dr. Irby Jones, changed her career ambitions from becoming a Dillard's salesclerk to becoming a doctor. In 1993, President Bill Clinton appointed Dr. Elders as the US surgeon general, making her the first African American and second woman to hold this position. Brown tells the stories of these doctors from the perspective of a black woman in medicine. Her journey as a medical student already has parallels to those of black women who entered medicine generations before her. What she uncovers about these women's struggles, their need to work twice as hard and be twice as good, and their ultimate success serves as instruction and inspiration for new generations considering a career in medicine or science

Dr. Brian H. Williams has seen it all, from gunshot wounds to traumatic brain injuries. In The Bodies Keep Coming, Williams ushers us into the trauma bay, where the wounds of a national emergency amass. Black bodies will continue to be wracked by violence, racism, and healthcare inequities until we enact changes of policy and law

The authors tell the story of the Association of Minority Health Professions Schools and the hard-won influence that it built in American politics and health care. This story speaks to the history of Black people's exclusion from medical fields and to racial inequities in health

Over 84,000 black and brown lives are needlessly lost each year due to health disparities, the unfair, unjust, and avoidable differences between the quality and quantity of health care provided to Americans who are members of racial and ethnic minorities and care provided to whites. Health disparities have remained stubbornly entrenched in the American health care system--and in Just Medicine, Dayna Bowen Matthew finds that they principally arise from unconscious racial and ethnic biases held by physicians, institutional providers, and their patients. Implicit bias is the single most important determinant of health and health care disparities. Because we have missed this fact, the money we spend on training providers to become culturally competent, expanding wellness education programs and community health centers, and even expanding access to health insurance will have only a modest effect on reducing health disparities. We will continue to utterly fail in the effort to eradicate health disparities unless we enact strong, evidence-based legal remedies that accurately address implicit and unintentional forms of discrimination, to replace the weak, tepid, and largely irrelevant legal remedies currently available. Our continued failure to fashion an effective response that purges the effects of implicit bias from American health care, Matthew argues, is unjust and morally untenable. In this book, she unites medical, neuroscience, psychology, and sociology research on implicit bias and health disparities with her own expertise in civil rights and constitutional law. Just Medicine offers us a new, effective, and innovative plan to regulate implicit biases and eliminate the inequalities they cause, and to save the lives they endanger.

Villarosa's New York Times Magazine article on maternal and infant mortality among black mothers and babies in America caused an awakening. A Black woman with a college education is as likely to die or nearly die in childbirth as a white woman with an eighth grade education. Her article made racial disparities in health care impossible to ignore. Here she shows how today's medical texts and instruments still carry fallacious slavery-era assumptions that Black bodies are fundamentally different from white bodies. Study after study of medical settings show worse treatment and outcomes for Black patients. Black people live in dirtier, more polluted communities due to environmental racism and neglect from all levels of government. And, most powerfully, Villarosa describes the new understanding that coping with the daily scourge of racism ages Black people prematurely.

his text examines the myriad of systemic challenges that are baked into the fabric of US society, perpetuating and permeating antiblackness across some of its most trusted institutions. Taken together, the chapters in this book are a guide for scholars interested in social justice promotion within and on behalf of black communities, complete with concrete tools and strategies for constructing authentic helping relationships

"Black Women and Public Health creates an urgently needed interdisciplinary dialogue about issues of race, gender, and health. An enduring history of racism, sexism, and dehumanization of Black women's bodies has largely rendered the health needs of the Black community inaudible and invisible. Grounded in the lived experiences and expertise of Black women, this collection bridges gaps between researchers, practitioners, educators, and advocates. Black women's public health work is a regenerative practice--one that looks backward, inward, and forward to improve the quality of life for Black communities in the United States and beyond. The three dozen authors in this volume offer analysis, critique, and recommendations for overcoming longstanding and contemporary challenges to equity in public health practices

Collected in a single volume for the first time, the writings in this novel anthology represent more than four decades of perspectives from the American Psychiatric Association's Solomon Carter Fuller Award lectures, named for the first Black psychiatrist in the United States. The chapter authors--Solomon Carter Fuller awardees themselves, psychiatrists building on the work of previous awardees, and other scholar experts--offer a multidisciplinary, cross-sectional examination of both the historical and contemporary environments that inform the Black experience in the United States.These treatises look at the intersection of mental health with topics that include the following: * Public health and public policy* Health care inequities* Racism* Economic well-being* Media* Education Emphasizing the real challenges that Black communities have faced and continue to face, each chapter also offers reasons for perseverance in the face of adversity.Readers will come away with a better understanding of the complexity of the Black experience in America and its impact on mental health, as well as a greater awareness of and appreciation for the legacy and ongoing contributions of Black psychiatric leaders to the field.