The Racial Dimensions of Public Health: Historical Perspectives

1 Course Unit

How does a disease become racialized? How do practitioners in medicine and allied fields deploy concepts of race? How has race influenced the way the public has perceived risk for specific health conditions? What is the process through which race emerged as a valid topic of scientific and biomedical inquiry in public and scientific discourse in America? In this course, we answer these questions and more as we examine how race mediates Western biomedical approaches to defining, treating, preventing, and talking about disease. Though race is largely understood as a social construct, medicine and science remain deeply complicit in creating the fiction that race is biology. As such, we consider how competing definitions of race have framed the development of the medical education, public health policy, activism, research, and relationships between health professionals and the lay public. Not Offered Every Year 1 Course Unit