Description
Book SynopsisPrecarious Prescriptions brings together essays that place race, citizenship, and gender at the center of questions about health and disease. Exploring the interplay between disease as a biological phenomenon, illness as a subjective experience, and race as an ideological construct, this volume helps us better understand the long and fraught history of health care in America.
Trade Review"
Precarious Prescriptions forges vital new terrain in the study of race, medicine, and public health in the U.S. and its borderlands. The book’s carefully crafted essays explore the relationships between medicine, health, and lived experience in such diverse locales and settings as Hawai’i, pre-revolutionary Texas, the Mexican-American borderlands, and the Salish Sea. By so doing
Precarious Prescriptions expands our understandings, not just of medicalized ‘race’ and ‘racisms,’ but of medicine itself, in all of its colonizing and liberatory implications. This is vital reading indeed." —Jonathan M. Metzl, author of
The Protest PsychosisTable of ContentsContents
IntroductionLaurie Green, John Mckiernan-González, and Martin Summers
1. Curing the Nation with Cacti: Native Healing and State Building before the Texas RevolutionMark Allan Goldberg2. “We Were Promised Medicines”: Health and Illness around the Salish Sea, 1853–1878Jennifer Seltz3. “I Studied and Practiced Medicine without Molestation”: African American Doctors in the First Years of FreedomGretchen Long4. At the Nation’s Edge: African American Migrants and Smallpox in the Mexican-American BorderlandsJohn Mckiernan-González5. Diagnosing the Ailments of Black Citizenship: African American Physicians and the Dilemma of Mental Illness, 1895–1940Martin Summers6. “An Indispensable Service”: Midwives and Medical Officials after New Mexico StatehoodLena McQuade-Salzfass7. Professionalizing “Local Girls”: Nursing and U.S. Colonial Rule in Hawai’i, 1920–1948Jean J. Kim8. Borders, Laborers, and Racialized Medicalization: Mexican Immigration and U.S. Public Health Practices in the Twentieth CenturyNatalia Molina9. “A Transformation for Migrants”: Mexican Farmworkers and Federal Health Reform During the New Deal EraVerónica Martínez-Matsuda10. “Hunger in America” and the Power of Television: Poor People, Physicians, and the Mass Media in the War against PovertyLaurie B. Green11. Making Crack Babies: Race Discourse and the Biologization of BehaviorJason E. Glenn12. Suffering and Resistance, Voice and Agency: Thoughts on History and the “Tuskegee” Syphilis StudySusan M. Reverby
ContributorsIndex
