Overview

Understanding the connections between culture, race, politics, and disease This groundbreaking book chronicles the history of sickle cell anemia in the United States, tracing its transformation from an ""invisible"" malady to a powerful, yet contested, cultural symbol of African American pain and suffering. Set in Memphis, where one of the nation's first sickle cell clinics was founded in the 1950s, Dying in the City of the Blues reveals how the recognition, treatment, social understanding, and symbolism of the disease evolved in the twentieth century, shaped by the politics of race, region, health care, and biomedicine. Using medical journals, patients' accounts, black newspapers, blues lyrics, and many other sources, Keith Wailoo follows the disease and its sufferers from the early days of obscurity before sickle cell's ""discovery"" by Western medicine; through its rise to clinical, scientific, and social prominence in the 1950s; to its politicization in the 1970s and 1980s. Looking forward, he considers the consequences of managed care on the politics of disease in the twenty-first century. A rich and multilayered narrative, Dying in the City of the Blues offers valuable new insight into the African American experience, the impact of race relations and ideologies on health care, and the politics of science, medicine, and disease.

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9780807825846

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Reviews

An eye-opening history of medical services for African Americans in Memphis. It ably melds the political and institutional history of the subject while focusing with discerning sensitivity on the role of race in the analysis and treatment of sickle cell anemia. By any measure an important book. - Daniel J. Kevles, Yale University

Author Information

Author of the award-winning Drawing Blood: Technology and Disease Identity in Twentieth-Century America, Keith Wailoo is professor of social medicine and history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 1999 he received the prestigious James S. McDonnell Centennial Fellowship in the History of Science.

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