SCIENCE TALK: Whose Medicine? Racism and Sexism in the History of Medicine

This talk puts the unequal distribution of medical authority at the center of the history of medicine, asking what it has meant that formal scientific medicine has historically been controlled by elite white men while the patients they treated were far more diverse. Everyone, regardless of their identity, gets sick or experiences health crises, but the production of medical knowledge to understand those crises has been bounded particularly by race and gender. Focusing on histories of the US and Europe, we will explore how racism and sexism, rather than innate biological difference, have shaped inequalities in both health outcomes and medical practice. Institutionalized racism created structural and ideological barriers to equitable care and practice, while sexism shaped how women were treated as patients and largely excluded them from medical authority. These inequalities continue to inform medical knowledge and practice today.

Doors open at 4:30 for event starting at 5:00.

Marjorie Levine-Clark is a Professor of History at the University of Colorado Denver. She is the author of two books, Unemployment, Welfare, and Masculine Citizenship: “So Much Honest Poverty” in Britain, 1870-1930 (Palgrave, 2015) and Beyond the Reproductive Body: The Politics of Women’s Health and Work in Early Victorian England (Ohio State University Press, 2004), and the editor of a four-volume primary source collection, Work and Unemployment, 1834-1911 (Routledge, 2022). She co-led the creation and implementation of the Inclusive Pedagogy Academy at CU Denver, a project supported by a Howard Hughes Medical Institute grant.