Abstract

bodies for clinical study. The irony, Hogarth notes, lies in the contradiction between the claim that black bodies were inherently different and the insistence that they were legitimate clinical specimens from which to learn how to heal white bodies. Even in the twenty-first century, the idea of innate racial difference affects how we understand health and sickness. Hogarth suggests that her book is only the background to what is now a normalized way of medically categorizing black bodies without even defining what “black” means. She points to the pervasive medical theory that hypertension is linked to race, a notion that gains traction in the media and in popular culture when it is affirmed by trusted figures such as Dr. Oz and Oprah Winfrey. Hogarth acknowledges that hypertension may in fact be linked to race – not because of innate racial difference but because black people are far more likely than white people to live under stressful conditions created by institutional racism (). Clinging to innate racial difference as an explanation for medical conditions prevents further inquiry into the social determinants of illness, Hogarth warns: “the use of the term ‘diseases afflicting the black race’ should give us pause” (). Together, the authors of The Medical Imagination and of Medicalizing Blackness call for more humanism in medicine, but from different angles. Altschuler steps inside the mind of the white male physician who dominated medical thought in the first century of the US; Hogarth steps inside the mind and body of the black person who lived with the consequences of that medical thought. What stands out when considering these monographs in tandem is the voluminous evidence we have of the meanderings of the white medical imagination in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when there is no equal and balanced record of black people’s thoughts on their own health and well-being. One wonders if it is a wasteful indulgence to create a sense of importance around how the white mind works, when what matters most is how people behave. Hogarth’s book shows how people behave – specifically how white physicians in early America falsely promoted themselves as experts on black physiology and used their influence to oppress black people and erase their suffering. It may be worth considering the early sparks of the white medical imagination in order to identify where racial disparities in health care originate. Hogarth’s book, despite its look into the past, suggests that it is even more crucial to examine existing medical reality, to determine who is genuinely suffering and how they might be healed right now.