Please join the Medical Heritage Library, Inc. for the third talk in our Spring Speaker Series!
When
Fri, April 9, 2021
12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EDT
Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/spring-speaker-series-sarah-l-berry-tickets-143311824525
Racial disparities in health and medical care have been highlighted by the current pandemic, but they have long roots in U.S. history. Teaching and researching this history is important for moving forward with restorative justice and health equity. A particularly rich starting point is “Black Museum,” a 2017 episode of the sci-fi television series Black Mirror. This episode features three fictional medical technologies that call up specific, real ethical problems in U.S. racial and medical history. The technologies, exhibited by the Black Museum’s owner, a former research recruiter, harken back to the nineteenth-century commodification of race and somatic difference in three linked areas: the new science of forensics (institutionalized in the original Black Museum of Scotland Yard); medical museums; and circus “freak” shows. This presentation explores the “Roots of Racism in Health and Medicine” collection and other resources in the Medical Heritage Library in order to uncover the historical connections among race, medicine, entertainment, and crime dramatized in the episode. This talk offers pedagogical techniques to immerse students in digital archival research, enabling them to make their own connections among race and health justice in U.S. cultural history.
Speaker
Sarah L. Berry, PhD, is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at State University of New York—Oswego. She specializes in Health Humanities and writes on medicine, gender, race, and U.S. cultural history. She is a Contributor-in-Residence at Synapsis, serves in the Health Humanities Consortium, and is working on a book titled, Patient Revolutions: Health and Social Justice in America from Abolition to the Affordable Care Act.