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.