Emerson College Library: Black History Month: Academic and Historic Resources

History of Western Medical Failure

Medical Apartheid
Call Number: R853.H8 W37 2006
Medical Apartheid is the first and only comprehensive history of medical experimentation on African Americans. Medical Apartheid reveals the hidden underbelly of scientific research and makes possible, for the first time, an understanding of the roots of the African American health deficit.
Black Mental Health
Black Mental Health: Patients, Providers, and Systems examines the role of African Americans within American psychiatric health care from distinct but interconnected perspectives. The experiences of both black patients and the black mental health professionals who serve them are analyzed against the backdrop of the cultural, societal, and professional forces that have shaped their place in this specialized health care arena.
Black and Blue
Black & Blue is the first systematic description of how American doctors think about racial differences and how this kind of thinking affects the treatment of their black patients. Black & Blue penetrates the physician's private sphere where racial fantasies and misinformation distort diagnoses and treatments.
Black Women's Health
This book gives a broad look at the problems that African American women face both mentally and physically as related to health care. It also describes ways that practitioners, researchers, and the society as a whole can aid in alleviating the issues that African American women face on a daily basis. The book proposes several ways in which to achieve this goal.
Race in a Bottle
Approved by the FDA in 2005, BiDil was originally touted as a pathbreaking therapy to treat heart failure in black patients and help underserved populations. Upon closer examination, Jonathan Kahn reveals BiDil became racial through legal maneuvering and commercial pressure as much as through medical understandings of how the drug worked. Kahn broadly examines the distinct politics informing the use of race in medicine and the health disparities caused by racism and social injustice that are being cast as a function of genetic difference.

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The Hidden Cost of Black Hair
Hair is an important part of black women’s identity, but throughout history it has also been a target of oppression. What is the true cost of having black hair?
Race and Psychiatry
The issue of race within psychiatry is most apparent in the psychiatric hospitals and institutions where, as one doctor who appears in this program puts it, "there is an overrepresentation of black people. There is also a problem of misdiagnosis and mistreatment because some medical staff don't understand why people from different cultures behave contrary to their expectations and therefore consider their behavior dysfunctional. This program looks at the issues of racism in mental health care, and at some black self-help groups that offer alternatives to the conventional psychiatric practices that have failed to meet the needs of the black community.
Wangari Maathai: Mother of Nature
During her lifetime over 30 million trees were planted. She did not relent even at the blink of death. Wangari Maathai was awarded the 2004 Noble Peace Prize due to her fight for the environmental conservation and standing against governments which worked towards destroying natural habitats. But who was Wangari Maathai and how did her passion for environmental conservation start? Walk in the journey of the 'Eco Warrior' and learn more.
Unnatural Causes
Unnatural Causes is a medical detective story out to solve the mystery of what's stalking and killing us before our time, especially those of us who are less affluent and darker-skinned. But its investigators keep peeling back the onion, broadening their inquiry beyond the immediate, physical causes of death to the deeper, underlying causes that lurk in our neighborhoods, our jobs and even back in history.
Memphis midwives work to address racial disparities in care
More women in America die from pregnancy-related complications than in any other developed country in the world, and black women are most affected. NewsHour Weekend’s Ivette Feliciano reports on one clinic in Memphis, Tennessee, where midwives are working to facilitate better outcomes by bringing holistic care to women of color. This is part of an ongoing series of reports called “Chasing the Dream,” which reports on poverty and opportunity in America.
How Covid-19 Exposes Systemic Racism in America
In America, Black people are almost twice more likely to die from covid-19 as White people. In this 10 minute video, Economist journalists explain how the pandemic has illuminated systemic racism in America.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
This docudrama based on the real story of an African American woman, Henrietta Lacks, and the cells which were used without her knowledge or consent for decades.