Health Inequities and Cultural Competency
Print and Electronic Books
This list includes only some of the books available from Hardin Library and the UI Libraries on health equity in medicine. To find other books, search the InfoHawk+ catalog with the following terms:
- Health and race
- Health equity
- Health status disparities
- Healthcare disparities
- Social determinants of health
For assistance, contact the Hardin Library Information Desk or your library liaison.
Books
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Why Are Health Disparities Everyone's Problem?
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Call Number: Open Access EbookISBN: 9781421441177Publication Date: 2021 -
Death Gap - How Inequality Kills
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We hear plenty about the widening income gap between the rich and the poor in America and about the expanding distance separating the haves and the have-nots. But when detailing the many things that the poor have not, we often overlook the most critical--their health. The poor die sooner. Blacks die sooner. And poor urban blacks die sooner than almost all other Americans. In nearly four decades as a doctor at hospitals serving some of the poorest communities in Chicago, David A. Ansell, MD, has witnessed firsthand the lives behind these devastating statistics. In The Death Gap, he gives a grim survey of these realities, drawn from observations and stories of his patients. While the contrasts and disparities among Chicago's communities are particularly stark, the death gap is truly a nationwide epidemic--as Ansell shows, there is a thirty-five-year difference in life expectancy between the healthiest and wealthiest and the poorest and sickest American neighborhoods. If you are poor, where you live in America can dictate when you die. It doesn't need to be this way; such divisions are not inevitable. Ansell calls out the social and cultural arguments that have been raised as ways of explaining or excusing these gaps, and he lays bare the structural violence--the racism, economic exploitation, and discrimination--that is really to blame. Inequality is a disease, Ansell argues, and we need to treat and eradicate it as we would any major illness. To do so, he outlines a vision that will provide the foundation for a healthier nation--for all. Inequality is all around us, and often the distance between high and low life expectancy can be a matter of just a few blocks. But geography need not be destiny, urges Ansell. In The Death Gap he shows us how we can face this national health crisis head-on and take action against the circumstances that rob people of their dignity and their lives.
Call Number: Only available in print: Hardin Library for the Health Sciences RA418.3.U6 A57 2019ISBN: 9780226641669Publication Date: 2019-03-19 -
The Political Determinants of Health
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How do policy and politics influence the social conditions that generate health outcomes? Reduced life expectancy, worsening health outcomes, health inequity, and declining health care options--these are now realities for most Americans. However, in a country of more than 325 million people, addressing everyone's issues is challenging. How can we effect beneficial change for everyone so we all can thrive? What is the great equalizer? In this book, Daniel E. Dawes argues that political determinants of health create the social drivers--including poor environmental conditions, inadequate transportation, unsafe neighborhoods, and lack of healthy food options--that affect all other dynamics of health. By understanding these determinants, their origins, and their impact on the equitable distribution of opportunities and resources, we will be better equipped to develop and implement actionable solutions to close the health gap. Dawes draws on his firsthand experience helping to shape major federal policies, including the Affordable Care Act, to describe the history of efforts to address the political determinants that have resulted in health inequities. Taking us further upstream to the underlying source of the causes of inequities, Dawes examines the political decisions that lead to our social conditions, makes the social determinants of health more accessible, and provides a playbook for how we can address them effectively. A thought-provoking and evocative account that considers both the policies we think of as "health policy" and those that we don't, The Political Determinants of Health provides a novel, multidisciplinary framework for addressing the systemic barriers preventing the United States from becoming the healthiest nation in the world.
Call Number: Only available in print: Hardin Library for the Health Sciences RA395.A3 D39 2020ISBN: 9781421437897Publication Date: 2020 -
Racism: Science & Tools for the Public Health Professional
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"This book outlines the relationship between racism and health, while providing public health professionals with a variety of actions, strategies, and tools to understand and address the public health implications of racism, as well as inspiration to pursue health equity"--
Call Number: Only available in print: Hardin Library for the Health Sciences RA563.M56 R336 2019ISBN: 9780875533032Publication Date: 2019 -
Black Man in a White Coat: a doctor's reflections on race and medicine
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One doctor's passionate and profound memoir of his experience grappling with race, bias, and the unique health problems of black Americans When Damon Tweedy begins medical school, he envisions a bright future where his segregated, working-class background will become largely irrelevant. Instead, he finds that he has joined a new world where race is front and center. The recipient of a scholarship designed to increase black student enrollment, Tweedy soon meets a professor who bluntly questions whether he belongs in medical school, a moment that crystallizes the challenges he will face throughout his career. Making matters worse, in lecture after lecture the common refrain for numerous diseases resounds, "More common in blacks than in whites." Black Man in a White Coatexamines the complex ways in which both black doctors and patients must navigate the difficult and often contradictory terrain of race and medicine. As Tweedy transforms from student to practicing physician, he discovers how often race influences his encounters with patients. Through their stories, he illustrates the complex social, cultural, and economic factors at the root of many health problems in the black community. These issues take on greater meaning when Tweedy is himself diagnosedwith a chronic disease far more common among black people. In this powerful, moving, and deeply empathic book, Tweedy explores the challenges confronting black doctors, and the disproportionate health burdens faced by black patients, ultimately seeking a way forward to better treatment and more compassionate care.
Call Number: Only available in print: Hardin Library for the Health Sciences R154.T84 A3 2016ISBN: 9781250105042Publication Date: 2016 -
An American Crisis: The Growing Absence of Black Men in Medicine and Science: Proceedings of a Joint Workshop
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Black men are increasingly underrepresented in medical schools and in the medical profession. A diverse workforce is a key attribute of quality healthcare and research suggests that a diverse workforce may help to advance cultural competency and increase access to high-quality health care, especially for underserved populations. Conversely, lack of diversity in the health workforce threatens health care quality and access and contributes to health disparities. In this way, the growing absence of Black men in medicine is especially troubling, because their absence in medicine may have adverse consequences for health care access, quality, and outcomes among Black Americans and Americans overall. To better understand the factors that contribute to the low participation of Black men in the medical profession, facilitate discussion of current strategies used to increase their participation in medical education, and explore new strategies along the educational and professional pipeline that may have potential to increase participation in medicine, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and the Cobb Institute jointly convened a 2-day workshop in November 2017, in Washington, DC. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop.
Call Number: Only available electronicallyISBN: 9780309476904Publication Date: 2018 -
Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology
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The accomplishments of pioneering doctors such as John Peter Mettauer, James Marion Sims, and Nathan Bozeman are well documented. It is also no secret that these nineteenth-century gynecologists performed experimental caesarean sections, ovariotomies, and obstetric fistula repairs primarily on poor and powerless women. Medical Bondage breaks new ground by exploring how and why physicians denied these women their full humanity yet valued them as ?medical superbodies? highly suited for medical experimentation. In Medical Bondage, Cooper Owens examines a wide range of scientific literature and less formal communications in which gynecologists created and disseminated medical fictions about their patients, such as their belief that black enslaved women could withstand pain better than white ?ladies.? Even as they were advancing medicine, these doctors were legitimizing, for decades to come, groundless theories related to whiteness and blackness, men and women, and the inferiority of other races or nationalities. Medical Bondage moves between southern plantations and northern urban centers to reveal how nineteenth-century American ideas about race, health, and status influenced doctor-patient relationships in sites of healing like slave cabins, medical colleges, and hospitals. It also retells the story of black enslaved women and of Irish immigrant women from the perspective of these exploited groups and thus restores for us a picture of their lives.
Call Number: Also available in print: UI Main Library RG67.U6 C66 2017ISBN: 9780820351353Publication Date: 2017 -
Skimmed: breastfeeding, race, and injustice
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Born into a tenant farming family in North Carolina in 1946, Mary Louise, Mary Ann, Mary Alice, and Mary Catherine were medical miracles. Annie Mae Fultz, a Black-Cherokee woman who lost her ability to hear and speak in childhood, became the mother of America's first surviving set of identical quadruplets. They were instant celebrities. Their White doctor named them after his own family members. He sold the rights to use the sisters for marketing purposes to the highest-bidding formula company. The girls lived in poverty, while Pet Milk's profits from a previously untapped market of Black families skyrocketed. Over half a century later, baby formula is a seventy-billion-dollar industry and Black mothers have the lowest breastfeeding rates in the country. Since slavery, legal, political, and societal factors have routinely denied Black women the ability to choose how to feed their babies. In Skimmed, Andrea Freeman tells the riveting story of the Fultz quadruplets while uncovering how feeding America's youngest citizens is awash in social, legal, and cultural inequalities. This book highlights the making of a modern public health crisis, the four extraordinary girls whose stories encapsulate a nationwide injustice, and how we can fight for a healthier future.
Call Number: Also available in print: UI Law Library RJ216 .F7345 2020ISBN: 9781503601123Publication Date: 2019 -
Fatal Invention: how science, politics, and big business re-create race in the twenty-first century
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An incisive, groundbreaking book that examines how a biological concept of race is a myth that promotes inequality in a supposedly "post-racial" era. Though the Human Genome Project proved that human beings are not naturally divided by race, the emerging fields of personalized medicine, reproductive technologies, genetic genealogy, and DNA databanks are attempting to resuscitate race as a biological category written in our genes. This groundbreaking book by legal scholar and social critic Dorothy Roberts examines how the myth of race as a biological concept--revived by purportedly cutting-edge science, race-specific drugs, genetic testing, and DNA databases--continues to undermine a just society and promote inequality in a supposedly "post-racial" era. Named one of the ten best black nonfiction books 2011 by AFRO.com, Fatal Invention offers a timely and "provocative analysis" (Nature) of race, science, and politics that "is consistently lucid . . . alarming but not alarmist, controversial but evidential, impassioned but rational" (Publishers Weekly, starred review). "Everyone concerned about social justice in America should read this powerful book." --Anthony D. Romero, executive director, American Civil Liberties Union "A terribly important book on how the 'fatal invention' has terrifying effects in the post-genomic, 'post-racial' era." --Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, professor of sociology, Duke University, and author of Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States "Fatal Invention is a triumph! Race has always been an ill-defined amalgam of medical and cultural bias, thinly overlaid with the trappings of contemporary scientific thought. And no one has peeled back the layers of assumption and deception as lucidly as Dorothy Roberts." --Harriet A. Washington, author of and Deadly Monopolies: The Shocking Corporate Takeover of Life Itself
Call Number: Only available electronicallyISBN: 9781595586919Publication Date: 2011 -
Superior: The return of race science
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Call Number: Only available electronicallyISBN: 9780807076941Publication Date: 2019 -
Medicalizing Blackness: making racial difference in the Atlantic world, 1780-1840
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In 1748, as yellow fever raged in Charleston, South Carolina, doctor John Lining remarked, "There is something very singular in the constitution of the Negroes, which renders them not liable to this fever." Lining's comments presaged ideas about blackness that would endure in medical discourses and beyond. In this fascinating medical history, Rana A. Hogarth examines the creation and circulation of medical ideas about blackness in the Atlantic World during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She shows how white physicians deployed blackness as a medically significant marker of difference and used medical knowledge to improve plantation labor efficiency, safeguard colonial and civic interests, and enhance control over black bodies during the era of slavery. Hogarth refigures Atlantic slave societies as medical frontiers of knowledge production on the topic of racial difference. Rather than looking to their counterparts in Europe who collected and dissected bodies to gain knowledge about race, white physicians in Atlantic slaveholding regions created and tested ideas about race based on the contexts in which they lived and practiced. What emerges in sharp relief is the ways in which blackness was reified in medical discourses and used to perpetuate notions of white supremacy.
Call Number: Only available in print: UI Main Library RA448.5.N4 H64 2017ISBN: 9781469632865Publication Date: 2017 -
The Racial Divide in American Medicine
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Contributions by Richard D. deShazo, John Dittmer, Keydron K. Guinn, Lucius M. Lampton, Wilson F. Minor, Rosemary Moak, Sara B. Parker, Wayne J. Riley, Leigh Baldwin Skipworth, Robert Smith, and William F. Winter The Racial Divide in American Medicine documents the struggle for equity in health and health care by African Americans in Mississippi and the United States and the connections between what happened there and the national search for social justice in health care. Dr. Richard D. deShazo and the contributors to the volume trace the dark journey from a system of slave hospitals in the state, through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the civil rights era, to the present day. They substantiate that current health disparities are directly linked to America's history of separation, neglect, struggle, and disparities. Contributors reveal details of individual physicians' journeys for recognition both as African Americans and as professionals in Mississippi. Despite discrimination by their white colleagues and threats of violence, a small but fearless group of African American physicians fought for desegregation of American medicine and society. For example, T. R. M. Howard, MD, in the all-black city of Mound Bayou led a private investigation of the Emmett Till murder that helped trigger the civil rights movement. Later, other black physicians risked their lives and practices to provide care for white civil rights workers during the civil rights movement. Dr. deShazo has assembled an accurate account of the lives and experiences of black physicians in Mississippi, one that gives full credit to the actions of these pioneers. Dr. deShazo's introduction and the essays address ongoing isolation and distrust among black and white colleagues. This book will stimulate dialogue, apology, and reconciliation, with the ultimate goal of improving disparities in health and health care and addressing long-standing injustices in our country.
Call Number: Only available electronicallyISBN: 9781496817723Publication Date: 2018 -
The Equal Curriculum: the student and educator guide to LGBTQ Health
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ISBN: 9783030240240Publication Date: 2019 -
Pathologies of Patriarchy: death, suffering, care, and coping in the gendered gaps of HIV/AIDS interventions in Nigeria
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Call Number: Main Library Stacks RC606.6 .B37 2020ISBN: 9781786607706Publication Date: 2019
