Medicalizing Blackness: Lessons from the 18th Century American Atlantic

Join Rana Hogarth, associate professor in the Department of History, for a talk based on her first book, Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840, which uncovers how physicians invested blackness with medical meaning in slave holding societies of the Americas. She'll offer perspectives from the past on how the perpetuation of myths about racial minorities and assumptions about innate racial difference can have devastating consequences. Finally, she'll examine what lessons we can learn from eighteenth-century experiences with epidemic disease and racial inequities in health.