Overview
- An effective synthesis of existing work while breaking new ground in the African American religious and secular response to race-based medicine
- Connects recent medical research to older ideas about racial superiority and inferiority, the black body, and race-based experimentation
- Unites scholarship on the historical, philosophical, theological, and scientific lens through which the black body has been viewed by the larger public and scientific community
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About this book
This book observes the idea of race as a false representation for the cause of disease. Race-based medicine, an emerging field in pharmacology, aims to create a specialty market based on racial groups. Within this market, the drug BiDil set a precedent in this area of medicine targeting African Americans as its first racial group. Consequently, selecting African Americans as a “starter group” led to ethical questions regarding the motive behind race-based medicine within the context of the larger treatment of blacks in American medical history. This book therefore links medicine and American eugenics, examines race-based medicine’s influence on the perception of the black body, traces the influence of BiDil’s approval on the resurgence of race-based medicine, and assesses the black church’s response to race-based medicine using black liberation theology as a means to social justice.
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Keywords
Table of contents (6 chapters)
Reviews
“Medical Stigmata encourages readers to apply similar hermeneutics to clinical contexts, using scripture to challenge the determinist narratives that pervade medicine and its adjacent industries.” (Audrey Farley, Marginalia, marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org, October 18, 2019)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Dr. Kirk A. Johnson teaches at Seton Hall University and Berkeley College in New Jersey, US. He is a member of the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities and The New York Academy of Medicine. He serves as a member of the Atlantic Health Systems Bioethics Committee and was formerly Assistant Director of the Medical Humanities program at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, US.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Medical Stigmata
Book Subtitle: Race, Medicine, and the Pursuit of Theological Liberation
Authors: Kirk A. Johnson
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2992-0
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Singapore
eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019
Hardcover ISBN: 978-981-13-2991-3Published: 30 October 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-981-13-4812-9Published: 29 December 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-981-13-2992-0Published: 12 October 2018
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: IX, 178
Topics: Medical Anthropology, Theory of Medicine/Bioethics, History of Medicine, Pharmacology/Toxicology