Recommendations from our site
“What she’s looking at is the unacknowledged racism and racial pseudoscience that underpins quite a lot of modern medicine in terms of its histories, the categories used, and the horrific experiments that were performed on people of African descent in the Caribbean under conditions of slavery that then allowed various individuals to claim scientific discoveries. If people had known the bases of these, and how they treated the people that they were experimenting on, it would be as appalling as anything we heard from the 1940s in Europe.” Read more...
The 2024 British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding
Charles Tripp, Political Scientist
“Sowemimo is incredibly insightful, analysing the power dynamics that are inherent in medicine. She looks at what we call implicitly racist (although it’s often quite explicitly racist) ideas around people’s tolerance of pain, the stereotype of the angry black women and the problem of black patients being seen as more challenging and difficult.” Read more...
Leah Hazard, Medical Scientist
“This is a really interesting book written by a doctor, so someone coming out of the medical profession. Annabel Sowemimo is a black female doctor so an even more important voice to be heard. She has done an incredibly detailed study of why we have such brutal health inequalities in this country. It’s about the racist nature of some of the health care choices and structures that we have. I have spent an enormous amount of time in the healthcare system, way more than your average person, but I was not aware of the scale of the challenges that people face if they’re from certain minorities. For example, black women are four times more likely to die in childbirth. It’s so shocking.
Again, she has done this fabulous balancing act of real detail and extremely careful research, sometimes academic research, but always coupled with stories from doctors, from patients and from healthcare professionals. It’s a very important book. We’re grappling with so many issues in this country at the moment and all of these books touch on them in some way, but this one does so in spades.”
