Health Care, History and Justice

Join Professor Alondra Nelson, Jonathan Metzl, MD/PhD, and medical ethicist Harriet Washington for a conversation on race and health in America. These three noted experts on health care and distinguished authors will discuss how access to quality health care—or in far too many cases, any health care at all—often falls along racial lines and is an issue that activists, beginning with the Black Panthers, have been fighting for decades.

Alondra Nelson, an interdisciplinary social scientist at Columbia University who writes about the intersections of science, technology, medicine and inequality, is the author of the book Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination.

Harriet Washington is the author of Deadly Monopolies: The Shocking Corporate Takeover of Life Itself and of Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, which won the 2007 National Book Critics’ Circle Award and was named one of the year’s best books by Publishers’ Weekly.

Jonathan Metzl, MD, PhD, is the Director of The Center for Medicine, Health and Society at Vanderbilt University and author of The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease and Prozac on the Couch: Prescribing Gender in the Era of Wonder Drugs will moderate the discussion.