Race, Medicine, & History Always Matters: Notes From A Black Medical Historian
This fall I will resume teaching at my university after completing my sabbatical. As my first book continues to make headlines for some and other exciting books on the socio-histories of race and medicine are steadily published, former students continue to contact me for titles as well as the syllabus to my, now at least locally infamous, undergraduate medical history course that I developed years ago and will teach this fall entitled, “Medicine, Healing, and Experimentation in the Contours of Black History” (MHE). For some it altered career paths and others it transformed lives and everyday racial understandings. And of course, the realist I am, I know there are those who also took the course and found it a complete waste of time. Ha!
I just took risks to bring together what I learned from graduate school and my own research while also centering race alongside the introduction of medical history. As many of us during the early part of the 2000s were then still living actively offline and keeping close ties in person through the graduate process, a friend from another university who I visited and studied with during research trips was doing a medical history project and as conversations went sometimes hours on race, medicine, and the social histories untold, I became deeply fascinated. By the time of my comprehensive exams I surprised quite many asking for several extra exams from my graduate adviser, one of which included medical history. Through it I read a lot and developed the full syllabus for the MHE course. I even got bold enough to submit for a department prize in grad school looking for innovative courses and syllabi, but alas my course was not seen as original enough.
Before taking any feelings of devastation too close to heart and getting emotionally serious to hold up the work, that same friend whose interest in the medical past peaked my curious own told me the best advice that worked — save it for the future and teach your students. The future matters more than some prize.
Once I accepted my tenure track job, I jumped right in and taught the MHE class. Those who took the course long realized several things; the readings were never the same each time taught, and were deeply reflective of my intellectual mood when I had to submit books at the time. But also interesting to the students and myself was selecting my books that unexpectedly lent regular dialogue on the coming medical future — prisons, diet and race, the pysche and the mind. When I first piloted the course Henrietta Lacks was the most talked about race and medicine must read book I heard everywhere. I even put on a community program around the book with a local leader and avid reader that resulted in a massive turn out due to the book’s popularity. Years later the story is still greatly talked about or at least expected in conversation, which tells a much bigger and important picture of millenial learning while also the span of historical exposure. Contemporary expectations of this book to tell an entire — rather delicate — history that extended centuries before Henrietta Lacks/John Hopkins University and well beyond the millenial era we are in now is even more telling.
Piloting the course I did so to integrate what I continued to see as separate worlds and fields of race, medicine, American history, and African American history/studies. Knowing the steady numbers of students who wanted to go to medical school nationally and especially at my university, I figured I would try to connect with that population of students to know race before medical school. It is a rare course by far at least across many classes I have heard of that center race the entire semester with books, articles, and in class projects that dealing with race in medical history from the slave ship through to the 21st century. Interestingly, the years of feedback from former students and especially medical school applicants who it seemed annually shared that the course stood out on a transcript, or the letters of recommendation caught attention, or the interview conversations went deeper with interviewers about what was the learning experience like taking such a rare course offered to undergrads on the history of medicine and race. It still is encouraging to hear of greater interest from students, faculty, and even doctors who see the value and critical need now even more to undo the persistent silences that happy histories dare not tell.
I never saw myself as a medical historian if merely because of years early the pushback I often received from some and the professing of others that there was no room for the angle I was offering on medical history, aboard slave ships, and thus centering race and the evolution of medicine and the black body before the rise of the American medical profession or the displacement of bondpeople in plantations. I know that I made race matter in the future history by being diligent in graduate school to pursue and demand more beyond the traditional narrative of history, medicine and blackness. While also being open to writing about and teaching this angle to undergraduates interested not just in medical school and or public health, but in these delicate histories that tell more about human nature and how far some will go for local, national and global advancements.
Race is mattering all over again in ways that I by far never saw coming to the study of medicine as a slavery scholar, female of color, and a now former caregiver to my mother who our story became years later a personal look at the lack of conversations that tangibly link race, strokes, class, sexuality, or technological understandings for at home survival. As a result, showing my students who using books that decenter race in medicine denies the realities of others (patients, at home caregivers) living and attempting to thrive albeit on the edges of societal memory.
Race, medicine, and its evolutionary history matters and it will even more in the future as we all reckon with a racial past to center the triumphs and horrors of advancements. I was trained in many areas that I chose and actively put together intellectually to understand the world of human living, human behavior, and evolution, most especially in its treatment of the ailing, diseased, and dying. The future will depend deeply on texturing the histories, the pain, suffering, the medical survival of many and all, but it will depend most on the active pursuit of individuals and institutions to tell and learn from the racial histories of medicine — known, unknown, and hidden. In the coming days ahead I will share more of what was gained learned and the consequences of leaving race on the back burner of education.
Until then, may the future and the rigorous learners most see the value of intentionally centering the racial medical past and why the histories must go even deeper.
Sowande’ Mustakeem
Author of Slavery at Sea:Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage
Slavery at Sea Booksoundtrack: https://slaveryatsea.bandcamp.com/releases
