Selected Viewing & Reading
Legacy by Uché BlackstockCall Number: BF 575.P9 B61 2024As an ER physician, and later as a professor in academic medicine, Dr. Blackstock became profoundly aware of the systemic barriers that Black patients and physicians continue to face. Legacy is a journey through the critical intersection of racism and healthcare. At once a searing indictment of our healthcare system, a generational family memoir, and a call to action, Legacy is Dr. Blackstock's odyssey from child to medical student to practicing physician--to finally seizing her own power as a health equity advocate against the backdrop of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement.
- Following in her mom's footsteps, a doctor fights to make medicine more inclusiveinterview with Tonya Moseley on NPR's Fresh Air
Under the Gun: An ER Doctor's Cure for America's Gun Epidemic by Cedric Dark, MD, MPH as told to Seema YasminCall Number: WA 308 D1 2024As an emergency room doctor whose own family has been affected by gun violence, Dark intimately understands how gun violence can destroy lives and communities. He reflects on the events that bring people to the ER while also talking to doctors who not only treat victims of gun violence but also own guns themselves. Under the Gun is a powerful meditation on this uniquely American epidemic and an urgent call to action toward a balanced gun policy in the United States.
- Will calling gun violence a 'public health crisis' change the political conversation?Interview with Cedric Dark
- The Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary Prevention of Gun Violenceopinion piece by Dr. Dark on Medpage Today
Birthing Justice: Every Woman Deserves a Beautiful Birth Story (film)Call Number: WA 310 DVD 2023Birthing Justice is a feature-length documentary film that follows the expertise & lived experiences of Black women through pregnancy, delivery and the postpartum period, medical and social justice experts expose the challenges they face—including genetic predispositions, chronic stress, racial bias, culturally ignorant care and barriers to adequate healthcare. Birthing Justice turns the spotlight on the progress being made by health initiatives and best practices.
Video is available on DVD or can be streamed via InovaConnect in our video library.
Twice As Hard by Jasmine BrownCall Number: WZ 150 B8 2023Jasmine Brown offers a rich new perspective, penning the long-erased stories of nine pioneering black women physicians beginning in 1860, when a black woman first entered medical school.
The Beauty in Breaking by Michele HarperCall Number: WZ 100 H19 2020Michele Harper is a female, African American emergency room physician in a profession that is overwhelmingly male and white. Her marriage at an end, Harper began her new life in a new city, in a new job, as a newly single woman. The Beauty in Breaking is the poignant true story of Harper's journey toward self-healing. Each of the patients Harper writes about taught her something important about recuperation and recovery.
Seeing Patients by Augustus A. WhiteCall Number: W 84 W58 2011Think growing up in Jim Crow-era Tennessee and training and teaching in overwhelmingly white medical institutions, Gus White witnessed firsthand how prejudice works in the world of medicine. While race relations have changed dramatically since then, old ways of thinking die hard. In this blend of memoir and manifesto, Dr. White draws on his experience as a resident at Stanford Medical School, a combat surgeon in Vietnam, and head orthopedic surgeon at one of Harvard's top teaching hospitals to make sense of the unconscious bias that riddles medical care, and to explore how we can do better in a diverse twenty-first-century America.
Just Medicine by Dayna Bowen MatthewCall Number: W 76 M19 2015Offers an innovative plan to eliminate inequalities in American health care and save the lives they endanger Over 84,000 black and brown lives are needlessly lost each year due to health disparities: the unfair, unjust, and avoidable differences between the quality and quantity of health care provided to Americans who are members of racial and ethnic minorities and care provided to whites. . In this book, she unites medical, neuroscience, psychology, and sociology research on implicit bias and health disparities with her own expertise in civil rights and constitutional law. In a time when the health of the entire nation is at risk, it is essential to confront the issues keeping the health care system from providing equal treatment to all.
Black Man in a White Coat by Damon TweedyCall Number: WZ 100 T9 2015As Tweedy transforms from student to practicing physician, he discovers how often race influences his encounters with patients. Through their stories, he illustrates the complex social, cultural, and economic factors at the root of many health problems in the black community. These issues take on greater meaning when Tweedy is himself diagnosed with a chronic disease far more common among black people. In this powerful, moving, and deeply empathic book, Tweedy explores the challenges confronting black doctors, and the disproportionate health burdens faced by black patients, ultimately seeking a way forward to better treatment and more compassionate care.
Living and Dying in Brick City by Call Number: WZ 100 D1 2013In this book, Dr. Sampson Davis looks at the healthcare crisis in the inner city from a rare perspective- as a doctor who works on the front line of emergency medical care in the community where he grew up, and as a member of that community who has faced the same challenges as the people he treats every day.
About the Authors
Photo credit: Diane Zhao/Penguin Random House
Dr. Uche Blackstock, author of Legacy: a Black physician reckons with racism in medicine
Dr. Blackstock is a physician and CEO of Advancing Health Equity, an organization devoted to helping healthcare organizations provide racially equitable care and to create an anti-racist workplace culture. Dr. Blackstock was recognized by Forbes magazine as one of “10 Diversity and Inclusion Trailblazers You Need to Get Familiar With”.
Cedric Dark, MD, MPH
Dr. Dark is an Associate Professor in the Henry J. N. Taub Department of Emergency Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. He currently is on the Board of Directors for Doctors for America, the Board of Trustees for Semester at Sea, and is the Medical Editor-in-Chief for the monthly publication ACEP Now.
One of emergency medicine’s Top 45 Under 45 and on Elemental’s List of 50 Experts to Trust in a Pandemic, Dark is a trusted voice on health care and health policy.
Dr. Seema Yasmin
Dr. Seema Yasmin is an Emmy-award winning journalist, author, medical doctor and professor. She trained in medicine at the University of Cambridge and in journalism at the University of Toronto. https://seemayasmin.com/
Michele Harper
Dr. Michele Harper is an award-winning physician, New York Times bestselling author, and nationally recognized speaker whose work centers on individual healing and social justice. She is an advocate of personal wellness and evolution as a foundation for collective liberation.
Augustus A. White III, MD
Dr. White was the first African American medical student at Stanford, surgical resident at Yale University, professor of medicine at Yale, and department head at a Harvard-affiliated hospital (Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center). He was a guest speaker for a Black History Month Fireside Chat for the Harvard University Schools of Medicine, Public Health, and Dental Medicine in 2019.
Jasmine Brown
Jasmine Brown is an American author and medical student. She is the author of the 2023 book, Twice as Hard: The Stories of Black Women Who Fought to Become Physicians, from the Civil War to the 21st Century.
Dayna Bowen Matthew
Dayna Bowen Matthew, JD, PhD, is the Dean and Harold H. Greene Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law School. A leader in public health and civil rights law who focuses on disparities in health, health care, and the social determinants of health, Dean Matthew joined GW Law in 2020. She is the author of the bestselling book Just Medicine: A Cure for Racial Inequality in American Health Care and the newly released Just Health: Treating Structural Racism to Heal America.
Damon Tweedy, MD
DAMON TWEEDY is a graduate of Duke University School of Medicine. He is a professor of psychiatry at Duke University School of Medicine and staff physician at the Durham Veteran Affairs Health System. He has published articles about race and medicine in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).
Sampson Davis, MD
Dr. Davis is an Emergency Medicine Physician at several New Jersey hospitals as well a Medical Director for several urgent care centers and substance abuse facilities throughout the country. While attending University High School in Newark, Dr. Davis met Dr. Rameck Hunt and Dr. George Jenkins, two fellow students who together made a promise to become doctors. In 2000, during his residency, Dr. Davis along with his two best friends felt the burning need to give back and created The Three Doctors Foundation (www.threedoctorsfoundation.org). Operating on the premise of H.E.L.M. (health, education, leadership and mentoring), their non-profit organization offers a series of free public programs to communities throughout the calendar year.