San Antonio College Library

Growing up in a New Jersey factory town in the 1980s, the author only knew that her aunt had died of a rare illness called Chagas. Digging deeper, she discovered more than three hundred thousand Americans have Chagas -- or the kissing bug disease. Why do some infectious diseases make headlines and others fall by the wayside? The author interviews patients, epidemiologists, and even veterinarians with the Department of Defense to discover more about...

"Black and Blue is the first systematic description of how American doctors think about racial differences and how this kind of thinking affects the treatment of their black patients. The standard studies of medical racism examine past medical abuses of black people and do not address the racially motivated thinking and behaviors of physicians practicing medicine today. Black and Blue penetrates the physician's private sphere where racial fantasies...

Fusing science and social justice, renowned public health researcher Dr. Arline T. Geronimus explores the ways in which systemic injustice erodes the health of marginalized people. America has woken up to what many of its citizens have known for centuries and to what public health statistics have evidenced for decades: systemic injustice takes a physical, too often deadly, toll on Black, brown, working class and poor communities, and any group who...

"'Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy, and Premature Birth' explores the issues of racism, medicine, and motherhood"-- A troubling study of the role that medical racism plays in the lives of black women who have given birth to premature and low birth weight infants. -- Provided by publisher. Black women have higher rates of premature birth than other women in America. This cannot be simply explained by economic factors, with poorer women lacking...

We hear plenty about the widening income gap between the rich and the poor in America and about the expanding distance dividing 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...

""Adverse Events" explores the connections between race, inequality, and the testing of new pharmaceuticals"-- "Imagine that you volunteer for the clinical trial of an experimental drug. The only direct benefit of participating is that you will receive up to $5,175. You must spend twenty nights literally locked in a research facility. You will be told what to eat, when to eat, and when to sleep. You will share a bedroom with several strangers. Who...

"In 2018, Linda Villarosa's New York Times Magazine article on maternal and infant mortality among Black mothers and babies in America caused an awakening. Hundreds of studies had previously established a link between racial discrimination and the health of Black Americans, with little progress toward solutions. But Villarosa's article exposing that a Black woman with a college education is as likely to die or nearly die in childbirth as a white woman...

"During those dark pre-antibiotic days, when tuberculosis killed one in seven people, white nurses at Sea View, New York's largest municipal hospital, began quitting. Desperate to avert a public health crisis, city officials summoned Black southern nurses, luring them with promises of good pay, a career, and an escape from the strictures of Jim Crow. But after arriving, they found themselves on an isolated hilltop in the remote borough of Staten Island,...