Precarious Prescriptions: Contested Histories of Race and Health in North America

by Laurie B. Green (Editor)

In Precarious Prescriptions , Laurie B. Green, John Mckiernan-González, and Martin Summers bring together essays that place race, citizenship, and gender at the center of questions about health and disease. Exploring the interplay between disease as a biological phenomenon, illness as a subjective experience, and race as an ideological construct, this volume weaves together a complicated history to show the role that health and medicine have played throughout the past in defining the ideal citizen. By creating an intricate portrait of the close associations of race, medicine, and public health, Precarious Prescriptions helps us better understand the long and fraught history of health care in America. Jason E. Glenn, U of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston; Mark Allan Goldberg, U of Houston; Jean J. Kim; Gretchen Long, Williams College; Verónica Martínez-Matsuda, Cornell U; Lena McQuade-Salzfass, Sonoma State U; Natalia Molina, U of California, San Diego; Susan M. Reverby, Wellesley College; Jennifer Seltz, Western Washington U.

320 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2014

Reviews

[Jadyn Ligoo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I absolutely loved engaging with this book and especially appreciated the authors’ insights on the weaponization of medicine by powerful political polities to uphold racially stratified regimes of power and labor extraction in the face of rapidly changing economic landscapes. In both texts, health is instrumentalized and health is illustrated as a project of citizenship and basis upon which claims to national identity and/or dignity can be contested and negotiated. Whether in the case of native Americans, Mexican braceros or Haitian migrants stigmatized for HIV, the authors demonstrate the potent power of narrative construction in successfully (and horrifically) pathologizing ethnicity to consolidate the symbolic, material and political power of a social strata of racially homogeneous people by creating an other that must be controlled, securitized or transformed to purchase their citizenship and dignity (if it all, it is perceived as attainable through said transformation).

Precarious prescriptions reveals the pathologizing implications of social life and structure as well as how dynamics along axes of power shape and frame experiences of illness, recovery and fatality.

[University of Chicago Magazine]

Laurie B. Green, PhD’99; John McKiernan-González; and Martin Summers
Editors

From our pages (May–June/14): "The complex history of medicine encompasses both world-altering scientific breakthroughs and human rights abuses, the latter often rationalized through racial prejudice. This collection of essays examines the intersections between medicine and race—from the demonization of peyote in native healing to the rise of the 'crack baby' as a symbolic cultural bogeyman—and sheds light on the relationship between race as a social construct and race as a personal experience."