Medicating Race

"Medicating Race charts a new course in critical race studies in biomedicine, one that takes seriously the vital importance of healing, the 'durable preoccupation' with race, and the somatic toll of racism. Anne Pollock asks us to revisit some of our most cherished assumptions about race and biomedicine in this theoretically informed and usefully provocative exploration of the social meanings of heart disease." - Alondra Nelson, author of Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination

"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

“This book is masterfully performative and empirically rich, offering insight to scholars of race, feminist science and technology studies, medical anthropology and sociology.” - Alexandra A. Choby, Sociology of Health & Illness

“Both provocative and important for the study of race and/in medicine. . . . Pollock’s book serves well in highlighting the importance of considering the entirety of the social world (including the biomedical) with the same political and moral concerns borne by more traditional social theory.” - Colin Halverson, Somatosphere

“[Pollock] offers a richer contextualization of the way race figures in medicine that positions medical science not as an exclusive or absolute authority, but one among many forms of ordering and reasoning about the simultaneously social and technical world we inhabit. ..  Pollock above all makes clear how different forms of knowledge, belief and reasoning are woven through the forms of collective organization and stratification sociology seeks to understand.” - Erik Aarden, Sociology

“This is a thought-provoking work, highlighting the social forces evident in the ‘plural noninnocent discourses’ regarding race and medicine.” - J.D. Campbell, Choice

“One of Pollock’s strengths is her insistence that medicine should be understood as both science and therapeutic practice, and thus as a contested and heterogeneous field that ‘not only arbitrates but also intervenes on difference.’  This enables her to develop a more sophisticated and sympathetic account of the motives and contribution of the African American politicians, activists, and doctors who championed the cause of black heart disease.” - David Skinner, New Genetics and Society

“Pollock provides insights for scholars interested in the mechanisms by which ‘race’structures medical practice, scientific knowledge development and pharmaceutical capital in the USA. She develops a compelling historical account of the varied meanings and significance of ‘race’ in the longer development of medical knowledge and practices constitutive of heart disease and, by extension, the wider field of American medicine.” - James T. Roanea, Global Public Health