On Race & Medicine

The controversy that continues to swirl around race, illness, and health should be extremely important to the medical humanist.  It is difficult to imagine another constellation of issues which implicate issues of stigma, eugenics, genetics, reductionism, biological materialism, disparities, and the social determinants of health, to name but a few.  From an interdisciplinary perspective, crucial contributions to the discourse flow from anthropologists, sociologists, historians, ethicists, scientists, physicians, and critical theorists, among others.

Given some of my professional focus on disparities and the social determinants of health, the issue is inevitable, especially given the hue and cry in the culture of (science and) biomedicine over (pharmaco)genomics.

Over at the Literature, Arts, and Medicine Blog, Felice Aull has a nice post on what she terms "racial borderlands."  I have one colleague in particular who does quite a bit of work on the notion of borderlands in context of the medical humanities, and I absolutely agree with him -- and with Felice -- that the concept is helpful in illuminating some of what is at stake in thinking about race, illness, health, and medicine.  In any case, go check out Felice's post.

Comments

[Dan Bustillos]

Hear! Hear!
Some of the confusion in this area that leads to the unfortunate "geneticization of race" is unsurprising as you can hear experts decry the aforementioned geneticization AND call for more research into genomic differences between races. This is not (necessarily) a paradoxical stance, but it requires more precision and accuracy in language than most media outlets are used to providing. This is especially worrisome given the high ethical and political stakes with which we're dealing at the juncture of race/genetics/pharma/medicine. Kudos to thinkers like you and Felice who can help clarify the semantics, the science, and the implications at work in this touchy arena.

[Daniel S. Goldberg]

Well said, Dan. And I agree that the two positions you identify are not incompatible, but require careful navigation, not just by the media, but by scientists and physicians as well.