Final Blog Post

In my initial index card I brought up ideas such as ethics, and regulations. In the course we did address these points in almost every book. Some of the books were more historical than questioning ethics. The book that contributed the most to my questions was in “Examining Tuskegee”. In those discussions the class brought up that understanding the prognosis of a disease is important however the consent of the patient outweighs those concerns. The course did address my concerns here and we analyzed the key actors involved. Perhaps, if this course was taught again, we could examine the beginning of medicine and how it evolved to be the modern science it is today. However, I did learn a lot about the race relations at the time notably “negro blood” and “white blood”. The misunderstanding that race in which the blood comes from does not matter. The blood type matters immensely but skin color itself is not the key factor. There is a relationship between evolution of facts and knowledge and racism that is not necessarily linear. If anything this is a chicken and a egg situation. Does scientific progress come with a decrease in racilizize thinking or does a decrease in racialized beliefs allow for scientific progress.

This changed my views because prior to the course I was not aware of HeLa cells. I learned what HeLa cells as the cells used by scientist to conduct cancer research. I thought the name “HeLa” was an acronym for something more technical like protein or enzyme names.

The class gave me a greater appreciation for race relations. I would like to think that I already understood that as a whole history is not a scale of events in the past were bad and the present are good.

Going forward I will use this information to look at the health care professionals more critically taking note of the different ethnicities in the hospitals that I work in. After taking the class I have been watching for more statistics such as “most diverse medical school class” and “proud of our community of healthcare professionals”. While studying in the pre health libary I noticed posters on the wall that broke down statistics of medical school applicants. Of which, the minorities were at the bottom of course. Because I took the course I now have a better understanding of what social and historical factors have gone into statistics like that. I found that books like “Black Man in a white coat” were powerful memoirs that demonstrates the issue in a more personal fashion than historical text.

The most engaging experience to me was the Dr. Wailoo talk as we prepared the most for it having read his book and had discussions already. It was once again really interesting and for lack of better words cool to see our conclusions line up with his.

Questions moving forward is slight variation on the one that I came in with, how can scientific progress improve our race relations and perspectives?