To mark Black History Month, we would like to highlight some recent publications available at the History of Medicine Library related to the experiences of Black communities. Published last year, Sean Morey Smith and Christopher D. E. Willoughby’s edited volume, Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery, was praised for ‘[decentralising] Western medicine in the lives of slaves’, engaging with case studies from across the Americas from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries and emphasising the survival of African medical practices. Also from 2021, Rebekah Lee’s Health, Healing and Illness in African History was recently described as ‘essential and rewarding reading’ for students. It provides a survey of existing scholarship while foregrounding less studied topics, such as mental health in colonial societies. Students wishing to know more about why ‘race’ became a central concept in medical practice within various imperial or transnational contexts can consult recent titles like Markku Hokkanen and Kalle Kananoja’s edited volume, Healers and Empires in Global History (2019), and Suman Seth’s Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-century British Empire (2018). Other recent publications available at HML have also focused on specific issues, attracting the attention of contemporary health practitioners, scholars, and media. Charles Jones’s The Organ Thieves (2020) analysed the traumatic history of how the heart of a deceased Black man was used in Virginia’s first heart transplant, without the donor’s or his family’s consent, illustrating the realities of 1960s segregation in the American South. Richard D. deShazo’s edited volume, The Racial Divide in American Medicine (2018), further explained past and present racial disparities in American healthcare, while also noting the contributions of Black Mississippi physicians to the Civil Rights Movement. All of these works take a multi-disciplinary approach to histories of medicine and race, which will be of interest to students.

Referenced book reviews:

Arriola, Kimberly Jacob, ‘The Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South’, American Journal of Transplantation, 21/3 (2021), p. 1339.

Humphreys, Margaret, ‘Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery. Edited by Sean Morey Smith and Christopher D. E. Willoughby’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 53/2 (2022), pp. 340-341.

Messac, Luke, ‘Rebekah Lee. Health, Healing, and Illness in African History’, Isis, 113/1 (2022), pp. 116-117.

Ohles, J.A., ‘The Racial divide in American medicine: black physicians and the struggle for justice in health care’, Choice, 56/6 (2019), p. 769