Final Blog Post

At the beginning of the semester, I wrote that I wanted to closely examine the concept of race and the major factor that it plays in the medical field, both past and present. From that point, I also wrote that I wanted to examine the different historical events that played a major factor on the lives of minority communities and how these communities adapted and/or coped. In reflecting on this note card written over three months ago, I think that my questions were addressed throughout the course in various primary and secondary sources. Though I think we could have gone into more detail on the subject, we did address race theory and the fact that race was socially constructed and used for a specific purpose. 

From there, we addressed the implications one’s race, even though it is socially constructed, has on their health and treatment in society. I greatly enjoyed reading material on the history of health care for slaves and how some of the racialized views of sick slaves are still present in the health care industry today. I also enjoyed learning about the racialization of illnesses in Natalia Molina’s Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939 and how the country regarded other minority communities who were not as historically present as African Americans. Another historical event that I enjoyed learning about was health care, or lack thereof, for African Americans after the Civil War in Jim Downs’ Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering During the Civil War and Reconstruction; this is a field of history that I know little of and am very interested in further investigating the African American community’s “transition” during Reconstruction before the Jim Crow era began. Towards the end of the semester, I enjoyed the readings that focused on the racialization, abuse, and exploitation of black bodies, highlighted in various texts such as Susan M. Reverby’s Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy, Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Damon Tweedy, M.D.’s Black Man in a White Coat: A Doctor’s Reflections on Race and Medicine, and Keith Wailoo’s Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health. Each these books focused on the racialized construction of minority communities, African Americans particularly, and how these views affected their health care. Furthermore, each book shows that it is not a myth that African Americans have been test subjects for different medical endeavors and that many did not see the problem in using black bodies for these experiments. 

Now that the semester is over, in reflecting on the different books read and the classes, I think that my initial question was mostly answered. Although it is impossible to “master” a subject or a topic in history in a mere three months, I enjoyed the different historical periods that the class focused on. If anything, I now have more questions about particular eras in history and how black bodies have been exploited and how I want to link these historical questions to my own personal academic research in the semesters and years to come.