Race and Medicine

This course looks critically at the role of race in modern medicine from historical and present-day perspectives. Race is central to any critical analysis of medicine--from the origins of gynecology and enslaved women, to tropical medicine and American empire, to contraceptive trials in Puerto Rico, to anti-Asian hate crimes in the advent of COVID-19. Through focused case studies, we will explore the racialized subject as intersecting with other categories of difference in medicine, such as sex, gender and sexuality. In parallel, we will ask how medicine has been used as a system of power and knowledge to create racial categories themselves.