Race, Medicine, & Society Reading Response - May 1, 2018

Race, Medicine, & Society Reading Response - May 1, 2018
Dying in the City of the Blues

      In the final half of Keith Wailoo's Dying in the City of the Blues, the topic moves towards attitudes about Sickle Cell Anemia in the late 20th century and feelings towards the communication of pain. As expressed, "In the early 1970s, sickle cell anemia had appeared on the national political scene as a case in point of long-ignored "pain and suffering" among African Americans."1 Sickle cell anemia had been largely ignored throughout the course of the early 20th century because of the symptoms expressed by the diseased. Symptoms of Sickle Cell Anemia align with those of other diseases such as Malaria. Not only was Sickle Cell hard to diagnose, it was hard to communicate to the doctors by the patients. How were they to describe the chronic pain they had to endure? And how were the physicians supposed to believe them? These factors led to a delayed reaction to Sickle Cell Anemia.
      New anxieties surfaced such as that of drug addiction. For their chronic pain, African Americans were given analgesics that were highly addictive such as Demerol.2 Skepticism began to surface within medical buildings. Were African Americans in actual pain or just abusing healthcare by faking and asking for drugs? Organizations began to worry that Sickle Cell Anemia may be producing drug addicts. Could this be a start to a War on Drugs under Nixon? Because of Sickle Cell Anemia leading to a need for drugs, African Americans began to become associated with drug addiction. This put them in a bad moral spotlight, just like what was done with Marijuana and the hippies.




1. Wailoo, Keith. Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health. Chapel Hill, NC: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2001. 199.
2. Wailoo, Keith. Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health. 200.