Medicating Race

In Medicating Race, Anne Pollock traces the intersecting discourses of race, pharmaceuticals, and heart disease in the United States over the past century, from the founding of cardiology through the FDA's approval of BiDil, the first drug sanctioned for use in a specific race. She examines particular sites of this long-standing and dynamic interplay of race and heart disease through analyses of the notion, among the founders of American cardiology, that heart disease was a modern, and therefore white, illness; constructions of "normal" populations in epidemiological research, including the influential Framingham Heart Study; medical debates about the "slavery hypothesis" and thiazide diuretics, a class of antihypertensive drugs that has been linked to African American hypertension; and physician advocacy for the urgent needs of black patients on both scientific and social justice grounds. Ultimately, Pollock insists that those grappling with the meaning of racialized medical technologies must consider not only the troubled history of race and biomedicine but also its fraught present. Medical treatment should be seen as a site of, rather than an alternative to, political and social contestation. The aim of scholarly analysis should not be to settle matters of race and genetics, but to hold medicine more broadly accountable to truth and justice.