Syllabus: A History of Anti-Black Racism in Medicine

The ongoing Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is revealing longstanding American health and healthcare disparities yet to be addressed. While some have described COVID as a “great equalizer,” policing, public health, medical care, and public funds are revealing otherwise. COVID-19’s impact on Black people in general and poor and working-class Black people in particular, has elucidated this country’s long disparate treatment of Black people and centuries-long neglect of Black health concerns. We hope this syllabus offers insight into those historical legacies, while simultaneously paving way for equitable health for all underrepresented populations.

Although the focus of this syllabus is the history of anti-Blackness in American medicine, we are aware that many of the texts are not from historians of medicine. Those scholars’ insights, however, are invaluable to our dissertation research and theoretical approaches. The selection of texts here also reveals the gaps that remain between the histories of medicine and science and Black studies. Though this syllabus is certainly not exhaustive, it lays important groundwork for bridging this gap and illustrating that questions of race and racism should be central to studying the histories of medicine and science. We hope that this syllabus serves not as an endpoint–but as a beginning.

Week 1. Medical and Scientific Theories of Racial Difference

• Lee D. Baker, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
• Mia Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 1830-1925 (Oxford University Press, 2000).
• Sharon Block, Colonial Complexions: Race and Bodies in Eighteenth Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).
• Andrew Curran, The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in the Age of Enlightenment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). 
• Thomas Foster, Rethinking Rufus: Sexual Violations of Enslaved Men(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019).
• Rana A. Hogarth, Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840 (University of North Carolina Press, 2017). 
• Terence Keel, Divine Variations: How Christian Thought Became Racial Science (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018).
• María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008) 
• Jennifer L. Morgan, “”Some could suckle over their shoulder”: Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology, 1500-1770,” The William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 1 (1997): 167-192. 
• Britt Rusert, Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (New York University Press, 2017). 
• Suman Seth, Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Mark Smith, “Getting in Touch with Slavery and Freedom,” The Journal of American History 95.2 (2008): 381-391.
• Linda Villarosa, “Myths about physician racial differences were used to justify slavert–and are still believed by doctors today,” 1619 Project.
• Christopher Willoughby, “”His Native, Hot Country”: Racial Science and Environment in Antebellum American Medical Thought,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 72.3, 328–351.
  

  Week 2. The African Diasporic Roots of Western Medicine and Science

• Benjamin Breen, “Fetishizing Drugs: Feitiçaria, Healing, and Intoxication in West Central Africa,” in The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).
• Pablo Gómez, “Incommensurable Epistemologies? The Atlantic Geography of Healing in the Early Modern Caribbean,” Small Axe 18.2. 44 (2014): 95–107.
• Margot Minardi, “The Boston Inoculation Controversy of 1721-1722: An Incident in the History of Race,” The William and Mary Quarterly 61.1 (January 2004): 47-76.
• Kathleen Murphy, “Translating the Vernacular: Indigenous and African Knowledge in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic,” Atlantic Studies, 8.1 (2011): 29-48.
• Katherine Paugh, “Yaws, Syphilis, Sexuality, and the Circulation of Medical Knowledge in the British Caribbean and the Atlantic World,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 88.2 (Summer 2014): 225-252.
• Londa Schiebinger, “West Indian Abortifacients and the Making of Ignorance,” in Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance, ed. Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 149-162. 
• Londa Schiebinger, Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017). 
• Timothy Walker, “The Medicines Trade in the Portuguese Atlantic World: Acquisition and Dissemination of Healing Knowledge from Brazil (c. 1580–1800),” Social History of Medicine 26.3 (2013): 403-431.
• Kelly Wisecup, “African Medical Knowledge, the Plain Style, and Satire in the 1721 Boston Inoculation Controversy,” Early American Literature 46.1 (2011): 25-50.

Week 3. Medicine, Health and the Slave Trade(s)

• Dauril Alden and Joseph Miller, “Out of Africa: The Slave Trade and the Transmission of Smallpox to Brazil, 1560-1831,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18.2 (1987): 195-224.
• Manuel Barcia, The Yellow Demon of Fever: Fighting Disease in the Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020).
• Daina Ramey Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation (Beacon Press, 2017).
• Marcus M. J. de Carvalho and Aline Emanuelle De Biase Albuquerque, “Os desembarques de cativos africanos e as rotinas médicas no Porto do Recife antes de 1831/ Landing African Captives and Medical Routines at the Port of Recife, Brazil Before 1831,” Almanack, 12 (2016): 44-64.
• Sidney Chaloub, “The Politics of Disease Control: Yellow Fever and Race in Nineteenth Century Rio de Janeiro,” Journal of Latin American Studies 25.3 (1993): 441-463
• David Lee Chandler, Health and Slavery in Colonial Colombia (New York: Arno Press, 1972).
• Philip Curtin, “Epidemiology and the Slave Trade,” Political Science Quarterly 83.2 (June 1968), 190-216.
• Dale Graden, Disease, Resistance, and Lies: The Demise of the Transatlantic Slave Trade to Brazil and Cuba (LSU Press, 2014).
• Walter Johnson, Soul By Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
• Sowandé Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage (University of Illinois Press, 2016).
• Carolyn Roberts, To Heal and To Harm: Medicine, Knowledge, and Power in the Atlantic Slave Trade (Forthcoming).
• Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from African to American Diaspora (Harvard University Press, 2007).
• Richard Sheridan, “The Guinea Surgeons on the Middle Passage: The Provision of Medical Services in the British Slave Trade,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 14.4 (1981): 601-625.
• Sasha Turner, “Slavery and the Production, Circulation and Practice of Medicine,” Social History of Medicine 31.4 (November 2018): 870-876. 

Week 4. Slavery Era Medical Practitioners and Practices

• Katherine Bankole, Slavery and Medicine: Enslavement and Medical Practices in Antebellum Louisiana (Garland Publishing, 1998).
• Christiane Bougerol, “Medical Practices in the French West Indies: Master and Slave in the 17th and 18th Centuries,” History and Anthropology 2.1 (1985): 125-143.
• Herbert Covey, African American Slave Medicine: Herbal and Non-Herbal Treatments (New York: Lexington Books, 2007).
• Sharla Fett, Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Plantations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
• Pablo Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).
• Niklas Thode Jensen, For the Health of the Enslaved: Slaves, Medicine and Power in the Danish West Indies, 1803-1848 (Museum Tusculanum Press, 2012).
• Stephen C. Kenny, “The Development of Medical Museums in the Antebellum American South: Slave Bodies in Networks of Anatomical Exchange,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 87.1 (2013): 32-62.
• Peter McCandless, Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry  (Cambridge University Press, 2011).
• Mariza de Carvalho Soares, “African Barbieros in Brazilian Slave Ports,” in The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade, eds. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Matt D. Childs, James Sidbury (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 207-232.
• Steven Stowe, Doctoring the South: Southern Physicians and Everyday Medicine in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004)
• Richard Sheridan, Doctors and· Slaves: A medical and demographic history of slavery in the British West Indies, 1680-1834 (Cambridge University Press, 1985).
• Sean Morey Smith, “Seasoning and Abolition: Humoural Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic,” Slavery and Abolition 35.4 (2015): 684-703.
• James Sweet, Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (University of North Carolina Press, 2011).
• Sasha Turner, “The Nameless and the Forgotten: Maternal Grief, Sacred Protection, and the Archive of Slavery,” Slavery & Abolition 38.2 (April 2017): 232-250.
• Karol Weaver, Medical Revolutionaries: The Enslaved Healers of Eighteenth-Century Saint Domingue  (University of Illinois Press, 2006).

Week 5. Disability in Slavery and Freedom

• Jennifer Barclay, “Differently Abled: Africanisms, Disability, and Power in the Age of Transatlantic Slavery,” in Jennifer Byrnes and Jennifer Muller eds. Bioarchaeology of Impairment and Disability: Theoretical, Ethnohistorical, and Methodological Perspectives (Springer: Cham, 2017): 77-94.
• Dea Boster, African American Slavery and Disability: Bodies, Property, and Power in the Antebellum South, 1800-1860 (New York: Routledge, 2013).
• Jeff Forett, “‘Deaf & Dumb, Blind, Insane, or Idiotic’: The Census, Slaves, and Disability in the Late Antebellum South,” The Journal of Southern History 82.3 (2016): 503-548.
• David Ingleman, “Kojo’s Dis/Ability: The Interpretation of Spinal Pathology in the Context of an Eighteenth‐Century Jamaican Maroon Community,” in Bioarchaeology of Impairment and Disability: Theoretical, Ethnohistorical, and Methodological Practices, eds. Jennifer F. Byrnes and Jennifer L. Muller (Springer: Cham, 2017): 95-117.
• Meredith Mininster, “”Female, Black, and Able: Representations of Sojourner Truth and Theories of Embodiment,” Disability Studies Quarterly 32.1 (Winter 2012).
• Stefanie Hunt Kennedy, Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean (University of Illinois Press, 2020).
• Ellen Samuels, “Examining Millie and Christine McKoy: Where Enslavement and Enfreakment Meet,” Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society 37.1(Autumn 2011): 53-81.
• Leonard Smith, Insanity, Race and Colonialism: Managing Mental Disorder in the Post-Emancipation British Caribbean 1838–1914 (London:  Palgrave Macmillan,  2014).
• Andrea Stone, “Lunacy and Liberation: Black Crime, Disability, and the Production and Eradication of the Early National Enemy,” Early American Literature  52.1 (2017): 109-140.

Week 6. Medicine, Reproduction, and Childhood in the Era of Slavery

• Jennifer Barclay, “Mothering the “Useless”: Black Motherhood, Disability, and Slavery,” Women, Gender, and Families of Color 2.2 (Fall 2014): 115-140.  
• Tara Inniss, “From slavery to freedom: Children’s health in Barbados, 1823–1838,” Slavery and Abolition 27.2 (2006):251-260.
• Deirdre Cooper Owens, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology (University of Georgia Press, 2017).
• Deirdre Cooper Owens and Sharla M. Fett, “Black maternal and infant health: historical legacies of slavery,” American Journal of Public Health 109.10 (2019): 1342-1345.
• Lorena Féres da Silva Telles, “Pregnant slaves, workers in labour: amid doctors and masters in a slave-owning city (nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro),” Women’s History Review 27.6 (2018): 924-938.
•  Diana Paton, “Maternal Struggles and the Politics of Childlessness Under Pronatalist Caribbean Slavery,” Slavery and Abolition, 38:2 (2017): 251-268.
• Tânia Salgado Pimenta, “Midwifery and Childbirth Among Enslaved and Freed Women in Rio de Janeiro in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Women’s History Review 27.6 (2018): 910-923.

Week 7. Medicine and Health in Post-Emancipation Era Societies

• Juanita De Barros, Reproducing the British Caribbean: Sex, Gender, and Population Politics After Slavery (University of North Carolina Press, 2014).
• Dayle DeLancey, “Vaccinating Freedom: Smallpox Prevention and the Discourses of African American Citizenship in Antebellum Philadelphia,” The Journal of African American History 95,3-4 (2010): 296-321.
• Jim Downs, Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction (Oxford University Press, 2012).
• Gretchen Long, Doctoring Freedom: The Politics of African American Medical Care in Slavery and Emancipation (University of North Carolina Press, 2012).
• Gretchen Long, “‘I Studied and Practiced Medicine without Molestation’: African American Doctors in the First Years of Freedom,” in Precarious Prescriptions: Contested Histories of Race and Health in North America, ed. Laurie B. Green, John McKiernan-Gonzales and Martin Summers (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).  
• Christienna Fryar, “The Moral Politics of Cholera in Postemancipation Jamaica,” Slavery and Abolition 34.4 (2013): 598-618.
• Melissa N. Stein, Measuring Manhood: Race and the Science of Masculinity, 1830–1934 (University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

Week 8. Medicine, Public Health and Racial Uplift

• Susan Muaddi Darraj,  Mary Eliza Mahoney and the Legacy of African-American Nurses. (Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2005).
• Vanessa Northington Gamble. Making a Place for Ourselves: The Black Hospital Movement, 1920-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
• Vanessa Northington Gamble, “‘Outstanding Services to Negro Health’: Dr. Dorothy Boulding Ferebee, Dr. Virginia Alexander, and Black Women Physicians’ Public Health Activism,” American Journal Public Health Vol. 106, No. 8 (August 2016): 1398-1404
• Vanessa Northington Gamble, “‘No Fight, No Struggle, No Court Battle’: The 1948 Desegregation of the University of Arkansas School of Medicine,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences Vol. 68, no. 3 (July 2013): 377-415.
• Darlene Clark Hine, Black Women in White: Racial Conflict and Cooperation in the Nursing Profession, 1890-1950 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989)
• Susan Lynn Smith,  Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired: Black Women’s Health Activism in America, 1890-1950. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995.
• Sabrina Strings, Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia (New York: New York University Press, 2019).
• Lynn M. Thomas, Beneath the Surface: A Transnational History of Skin Lighteners (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020).
• Thomas J. Ward Jr., Black Physicians in the Jim Crow South (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2003).

Week 9. Eugenics and Progressive Era Racial Science

• Gregory Michael Dorr, Segregation’s Science: Eugenics and Society in Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008).
• Gregory Michael Dorr and Angela Logan, “‘Quality, Not Mere Quantity, Counts’: Black Eugenics and the NAACP Baby Contests,” in A Century of Eugenics in America: From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era, ed. Paul Lombardo, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011.
• Daylanne K. English,  Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
• Paul Lombardo, “Anthropometry, Race, and Eugenic Research: ‘Measurements of Growing Negro Children’ at the Tuskegee Institute, 1932-1944,” in The Uses of Humans In Experiment: Perspectives from the 17^th to the 20^th Century, eds. Erika Dyck and Larry Stewart, Leiden: Brill, 2016.
• Michele Mitchell,  Righteous Propagation: African-Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
• Ayah Nuriddin,“The Black Politics of Eugenics,” Nursing Clio blog, June 1, 2017.
• Ayah Nuriddin, “Engineering Uplift: Black Eugenics as Black Liberation,” in Nature Remade: Engineering Life, Envisioning Worlds, eds. Luis Campos, Michael R. Dietrich, Tiago Saraiva, and Chris Young, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. (forthcoming)
• Dorothy E. Roberts,  Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. New York: Pantheon Books, 1997

Week 10. Black People as Experimental Subjects

• Daina Ramey Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017).
• DeNeen L. Brown, “‘You’ve got bad blood’: The Horror of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment.”
• Allen Hornblum, Acres of Skin: Human Experiments at Holmesburg Prison (New York: Routledge, 1998).
• Allen Hornblum, Sentenced to Science: One Black Man’s Story of Imprisonment in America. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007
• James H. Jones, Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment (New York: The Free Press, 1981).
• Susan Reverby, Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy (North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).
• Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (New York: Crown Publishers, 2010).
• Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (Doubleday Books, 2006).

Week 11. 20th Century Race and Mental Health

• Price M. Cobbs and William H. Grier, Black Rage (New York: Basic Books, 1968).
• Matthew Gambino, “‘These Strangers Within Our Gates’: Race, Psychiatry, and Mental Illness Among Black Americans at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC, 1900-1940,” Journal of the History of Psychiatry 19, no. 4 (2008): 387-408.
• Gabriel Mendes, Under the Strain of Color: Harlem’s Lafargue Clinic and the Promise of an Antiracist Psychiatry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015).
• Jonathan Metzl,  The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became A Black Disease (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009).
• Ayah Nuriddin, “Psychiatric Jim Crow: Desegregation at the Crownsville State Hospital, 1948-1970,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Vol. 74, Iss. 1, January 2019.
• Martin Summers, “Diagnosing the Ailments of Black Citizenship: The African American Medical Profession and the Politics of Mental Illness, 1895-1940.” In Precarious Prescriptions: Contested Histories of Race and Health in North America, edited by Laurie Green, John McKiernan-Gonzalez, and Martin Summers (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
• Martin Summers, Madness in the City of Magnificent Intentions: A History of Race and Mental Illness in the Nation’s Capital (Oxford University Press, 2019).
• Martin Summers, “‘Suitable Care for the African Afflicted with Insanity’: Race, Madness, and Social Order in Comparative Perspective,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 84.1 (Spring 2010): 58-91.
• Zosha Stuckey, “Race, Apology, and Public Memory at Maryland’s Hospital for the ‘Negro’ Insane,” Disability Studies Quarterly 37.1 (2017).

Week 12. Race and Medicine from Civil Rights to Black Power

• John Dittmer, The Good Doctors: The Medical Committee for Human Rights and the Struggle for Social Justice in Health Care (Oxford: University of Mississippi Press, 2009).
• Wangui Muigai, “”Something Wasn’t Clean”: Black Midwifery, Birth, and Postwar Medical Education in All My Babies.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 93.1 (2019): 82–113
• Alondra Nelson, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
• Ezelle Sanford III, “Civil Rights and Healthcare: Remembering Simkins v. Cone,”  Black Perspectives, (February 2017).
• David Barton Smith, The Power to Heal: Civil Rights, Medicare, and the Struggle to Transform America’s Health Care System (Tennessee: Vanderbilt University Press, 2016).

Week 13. 20th and 21st Century Social and Environmental Effects of Racism

• Mindy Thompson Fullilove, Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurt America, And What We Can do About It (New York: New York University Press, 2016).
• Evelynn M. Hammonds and Susan Reverby, “Toward a Historically Informed Analysis of Racial Health Disparities Since 1619,” American Journal of Public Health 109.10 (2019).
• Gregg Mitman, Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).
• David McBride, From TB to AIDS: Epidemics Among Urban Blacks since 1900 (New York: State University of New York Press, 1991).
• Richard M. Mizelle, Jr., Backwater Blues: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the African American Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
• Samuel K. Roberts, Infectious Fear: Politics, Disease, and the Health Effects of Segregation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
• Keith Wailoo, Dying in the City of Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
• Harriet A. Washington, A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and its Assaults on the American Mind (New York: Hachette Book Group, 2019).

Week 14. HIV/AIDS in Black America and its Legacy

• African American AIDS Activism Oral History Project
• Michele Tracy Berger, Workable Sisterhood: The Political Journey of Stigmatized Women with HIV/AIDS (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2004).
• Cathay J. Cohen, Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
• Evelynn M. Hammonds, “Missing Persons: Black Women and AIDS,” Radical America 24.2 (July 1992).
• Evelynn M. Hammonds, “Race, Sex AIDS: The Construction of ‘Other,'” Radical America 20.6 (Nov.-Dec. 1987). 28-38.
• Stephen J. Inrig, North Carolina and the Problem of AIDS: Advocacy, Politics, and Race in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).
• Alyson O’Daniel, Holding On: African American Women Surviving HIV/AIDS (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016).
• Dan Royles, To Make the Wounded Whole: The African American Struggle against HIV/AIDS (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020).
• “The Black AIDS Epidemic,” Souls 21.2-3 (2019-2020).
• Linda Villarosa, “America’s Hidden H.I.V. Epidemic,” New York Times, June 6, 2017.

Week 15. Genetics & the Re-biologization of Race

• Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and US Imperialism in Puerto Rico (University of California Press, 2002).
• Jonathan Kahn, Race in a Bottle: The Story of BiDil and Racialized Medicine in a Post-Genomic Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).
• Alondra Nelson, The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation After the Genome (Boston: Beacon Press, 2016).
• Anne Pollock,  Medicating Race: Heart Disease and Durable Preoccupations with Difference (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012).
• Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century (New York: The New Press, 2011). 
• Dorothy Roberts, “The Problem with Race-Based Medicine,” TED Talk, 2016.
• Michael Yudell, Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).

Week 16. Anti-Black Racism & COVID-19

• Chelsey Carter & Ezelle Sanford III, “The Myth of Black Immunity: Racialized Disease during the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Black Perspectives (2020).
• Merlin Chowkwanyun and Adolph L. Reed Jr. “Racial Health Disparities and Covid-19: Caution and Context,” New England Journal of Medicine, May 6, 2020.
• Lisa A. Cooper, Lakshmi Krishnan and S. Michelle Ogunwole, “Historical Insights on Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), the 1918 Influenza Pandemic, and Racial Disparities: Illustrating a Path Forward,” Annals of Internal Medicine, June 5, 2020.
• Antoine S. Johnson, “From HIV-AIDS to COVID-19: Black Vulnerability and Medical Uncertainty,” Black Perspectives (2020).
• Elise A. Mitchell, “‘If Bitterness Were a Whetstone’: On Grief, History and COVID-19,” Black Perspectives (2020).
• Ayah Nuriddin, “Race, Resistance, and the Rona,” Part I, Electric Marronage (2020).
• ——, “Race, Resistance and the Rona,” Part II, Electric Marronage (2020).
• Nic John Ramos, “Solving Our Urban Crisis Involves Addressing Hospitals in Addition to Policing,” Washington Post (2020).
• Linda Villarosa, “‘A Terrible Price’: The Deadly Racial Disparities of COVID-19 in America.”

Recommended Textbooks and Edited Volumes

• Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (Doubleday Books, 2006).
• Sean Morey Smith and Christopher Willoughby eds. Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery (LSU Press, Forthcoming).
• eds. John Mckiernan-González, Laurie B. Green, Martin Summers, Precarious Prescriptions: Contested Histories of Race and Health in North America (University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
• Byrd, W. Michael, and Linda A Clayton. A Medical History of African-Americans and the Problem of Race: Beginnings to 1900. Vol. 1 of An American Health Dilemma (New York: Routledge, 2000).
• Byrd, W. Michael, and Linda A. Clayton. Race, Medicine, and Health Care in the United States, 1900-2000. Vol. 2 of An American Health Dilemma (New York: Routledge, 2002).

*We are incredibly grateful to Dr. Ezelle Sanford III and Dr. Nic John Ramos for their input, support, and perspectives.

Copyright © AAIHS. May not be reprinted without permission.