Race and Medicine: Philosophical and Historical Perspectives
Among the many axes of racial inequality, disparities in access to medicine remain particularly stark. This is especially visible in the United States, where the lack of publicly funded universal health care means that poor and working-class people – among whom, as everywhere, there are disproportionate numbers of non-white racial and ethnic minorities – who are at a particular disadvantage within American healthcare system(s). And, in the US, even controlling for class-based metrics, African Americans, in particular, are more likely to suffer from a panoply of health risks at significantly higher rates than their counterparts. This workshop brings together four scholars working on the intersections on race, medicine, and healthcare from both historical and philosophical perspectives, tracing the mutations of health inequality over time and reflecting on the philosophical implications for questions of racial justice.
Participants
Elena Comay del Junco is post-doctoral fellow at the Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto. Her work spans ancient philosophy and philosophy of race, with an emphasis on race and medicine.
Korey Garibaldi is Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies at Notre Dame. Garibaldi studies the social and intellectual history of the United States, with a special interest in the history of late nineteenth and twentieth-century literary production. He also studies the cultural history of race and medicine in the 20th century.
Evelynn Hammonds is the Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz Professor of the History of Science and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Professor Hammonds is the author of Childhood’s Deadly Scourge: The Campaign to Control Diphtheria in New York City , 1880–1930 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). She co-edited with Barbara Laslett, Sally G. Kohlstedt, and Helen Longino Gender and Scientific Authority (University of Chicago Press, 1996). She has published articles on the history of disease, race and science, African American feminism, African American women and the epidemic of HIV/AIDS, and analyses of gender and race in science and medicine.
Yolonda Yvette Wilson is a 2019-2020 fellow at the National Humanities Center and a 2019-2020 Encore Public Voices fellow. Her research interests include bioethics, social and political philosophy, race theory, and feminist philosophy. She is broadly interested in the nature and limits of the state’s obligations to rectify historic and continuing injustice, particularly in the realm of health care, and is developing an account of justice that articulates specific requirements for racial justice in health care at the end of life.
Schedule
Morning: Philosophy
9h30-11: Yolonda Wilson, “Race, Health Justice, and the Policing of Black Bodies”
11h30-1: Elena Comay del Junco, “Racism as Neglect: Lessons for Philosophy from the History of Medicine”
Afternoon: History
2:30-4: Korey Garibaldi, “Toward a Literary History of Racial Medicine”
4:30-6: Evelynn Hammonds, TBA
09:30 AM - 06:00 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin
