Black History Month - Health and Wellness

 

This year the theme for Black History Month focuses on Health and Wellness. To give the proper praise and acknowledgment to the roles played in regards to medical care and advancement and voice to the disparity and prejudice that occurs when seeking medical care.

Medicine by Rich, Mari

Provides information on African-American medical professionals that have added to the worlds knowledge in making saving lives.

 

Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson story by Carson, Ben

"Dr. Ben Carson is known around the world for breakthroughs in neurosurgery that have brought hope where no hope existed. In 'Gifted Hands', he tells of his inspiring odyssey from his childhood in inner-city Detroit to his position as director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions at age thirty-three. Taking you into the operating room where he has saved countless lives, Ben Carson is a role model for anyone who attempts the seemingly impossible" --Cover, p. 4.

 

Patricia's Vision : The Doctor Who Saved Sight by Lord, Michelle

"Born in 1940s Harlem, Patricia Bath dreamed of being a doctor--even though that wasn't a career option for most women. This biography follows Dr. Bath in her quest to become an ophthalmologist and restore sight to the blind. "Choosing miracles" when everyone else had given up hope, she invented a specialized laser for removing cataracts, becoming the first African American woman doctor to receive a medical patent"-- Provided by publisher.

The Strong Black Woman: How a Myth Endangers the Physical and Mental Health of Black Women by Golden, Marita

"Meet Black women who have learned through hard lessons the importance of self-care and how to break through the cultural and family resistance to seeking therapy and professional mental health care. The Strong Black Woman Syndrome. For generations, in response to systemic racism, Black women and African American culture created the persona of the Strong Black Woman, a woman who, motivated by service and sacrifice, handles, manages, and overcomes any problem, any obstacle. The syndrome calls on Black women to be the problem-solvers and chief caretakers for everyone in their lives―never buckling, never feeling vulnerable, and never bothering with their pain. Hidden mental health crisis of anxiety and depression. To be a Black woman in America is to know you cannot protect your children or guarantee their safety, your value is consistently questioned, and even being “twice as good” is often not good enough. Consequently, Black women disproportionately experience anxiety and depression. Studies now conclusively connect racism and mental health―and physical health. Take care of your emotional health. You deserve to be emotionally healthy for yourself and those you love. More and more young Black women are re-examining the Strong Black Woman syndrome and engaging in self-care practices that change their lives"--. Provided by publisher.

Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen: The Emotional Lives of Black Women by Burnett-Zeigler, Inger

 
A Northwestern University clinical psychologist challenges common cultural misconceptions to reveal the real-world systemic abuse, health traumas, and abandonment that disempower today's Black women and force them to hide behind masks of strength.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Skloot, Rebecca

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer, yet her cells--taken without her knowledge--became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first "immortal" human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer and viruses; helped lead to in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions. Yet Henrietta Lacks is buried in an unmarked grave. Her family did not learn of her "immortality" until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. The story of the Lacks family is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of--From publisher description.

 

Killing The Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty by Roberts, Dorothy E.
 

"The image of the 'Welfare Queen' still dominates white America's perceptions of Black women. It is an image that also continues to shape our government's policies concerning Black women's reproductive decisions. Proposed legislation to alleviate poverty focuses on plans to deny benefits to children born to welfare mothers and to require insertion of birth-control implants as a condition of receiving aid. Meanwhile a booming fertility industry serves primarily infertile white couples. ... Roberts exposes America's systemic abuse of Black women's bodies, from slave masters' economic stake in bonded women's fertility to government programs that coerced thousands of poor black women into being sterilized as late as the 1970s. These abuses, Roberts argues, point not only to the degradation of Black motherhood but to the exclusion of Black women's reproductive needs from the feminist agenda."

 

Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present by Washington, Harriet A.

The first comprehensive history of medical experimentation on African Americans. Starting with the earliest encounters between Africans and Western medical researchers and the racist pseudoscience that resulted, it details the way both slaves and freedmen were used in hospitals for experiments conducted without a hint of informed consent--a tradition that continues today within some black populations. It shows how the pseudoscience of eugenics and social Darwinism was used to justify experimental exploitation and shoddy medical treatment of blacks, and a view that they were biologically inferior, oversexed, and unfit for adult responsibilities. New details about the government's Tuskegee experiment are revealed, as are similar, less well-known medical atrocities conducted by the government, the armed forces, and private institutions. This book reveals the hidden underbelly of scientific research and makes possible, for the first time, an understanding of the roots of the African American health deficit.--From publisher description.

 

Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

"A "choral history" of African Americans covering 400 years of history in the voices of 80 writers, edited by the bestselling, National Book Award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain. Last year marked the four hundredth anniversary of the first African presence in the Americas--and also launched the Four Hundred Souls project, spearheaded by Ibram X. Kendi, director of the Antiracism Institute of American University, and Keisha Blain, editor of The North Star. They've gathered together eighty black writers from all disciplines -- historians and artists, journalists and novelists--each of whom has contributed an entry about one five-year period to create a dynamic multivoiced single-volume history of black people in America"-- Provided by publisher.

Born Curious: 20 Girls Who Grew Up To Be Awesome Scientists by Freeman, Martha

"A collection of biographies of twenty groundbreaking women scientists who were curious kids and grew up to make incredible discoveries."-- Provided by publisher.