Beginning with the origins of Western medicine and science in Egypt, Greece, and Rome the authors explore the relationship between race, medicine, and health care. An American Health Dilemma offers an extensive examination of the history of intellectual and scientific racism that evolved to give sanction to the mistreatment, medical abuse, and neglect of African Americans and other non-White people.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203904109

Today blacks live five to seven fewer years than whites. Black infant mortality is 2.2 times that of whites. Blacks lead in death rates in 14 of 16 leading diseases, many preventable. Diabetes is 33% more common in blacks, and cancer mortality has increased 50% for blacks since 1950 but only 10% for whites. Breakthroughs such as vaccinations, invasive cardiac procedures, cancer therapies, MRIs, and organ transplants have dramatically improved the health of Americans in the last century, but health care for African Americans has been dangerously deficient, even unavailable. An American Health Dilemma is the first comprehensive history to explore African Americans' disadvantages in the area of health. In the highly anticipated volume two, Byrd and Clayton complete the story begun in the first volume, bringing us from the turn of the century to the health-care disparities that persist. Clayton argues that health-care racism is a systematic culturally embedded problem that in the last hundred years has been marked by small gains, disastrous setbacks, and a passive acceptance of African Americans as a permanent health underclass. Even steps forward in the 1960's, they maintain, didn't do enough to change the present situation.
A monumental and original work of scholarship, An American Health Dilemma will be the essential reference about black medical health experience for years to come.