Overview

In Medicating Race, Anne Pollock traces the intersecting discourses of race, pharmaceuticals, and heart disease in the United States over the past century, from the founding of cardiology through the FDA's approval of BiDil, the first drug sanctioned for use in a specific race. She examines wide-ranging aspects of the dynamic interplay of race and heart disease: articulations, among the founders of American cardiology, of heart disease as a modern, and therefore white, illness; constructions of normal populations in epidemiological research, including the influential Framingham Heart Study; debates about the distinctiveness African American hypertension, which turn on disparate yet intersecting arguments about genetic legacies of slavery and the comparative efficacy of generic drugs; and physician advocacy for the urgent needs of black patients on professional, scientific, and social justice grounds. Ultimately, Pollock insists that those grappling with the meaning of racialized medical technologies must consider not only the troubled history of race and biomedicine but also its fraught yet vital present. Medical treatment should be seen as a site of, rather than an alternative to, political and social contestation. The aim of scholarly analysis should not be to settle matters of race and genetics, but to hold medicine more broadly accountable to truth and justice.

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9781283622738

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Reviews

Based on exceptionally thorough scholarship and full of thought-provoking ideas, Medicating Race addresses one of the most perplexing and contentious topics in biomedical research and medical practice during the past century: race and its implications for health, disease, and treatment. Anne Pollock is trained in science and technology studies and is sensitive to the complexities of knowledge, politics, markets, and social categories. In this original study, she reveals how the modern history of heart disease is intertwined not only with the emergence and growth of the field of cardiology but also with civil rights struggles, pharmaceutical drug development and marketing, and changing notions of the biological and social meanings of race. --Steven Epstein, author of Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research

Author Information

Anne Pollock is an Assistant Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Georgia Tech.

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