Medical Stigmata

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-ix

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Kirk A. Johnson

   Pages 1-7

3. Race-Based Medicine

   • Kirk A. Johnson

   Pages 9-38

4. Maleficence Toward the Minority Patient

   • Kirk A. Johnson

   Pages 39-72

5. Research, Race and Profit

   • Kirk A. Johnson

   Pages 73-124

6. Black Theology and Reconciliation

   • Kirk A. Johnson

   Pages 125-157

7. Conclusion

   • Kirk A. Johnson

   Pages 159-165

8. Back Matter

   Pages 167-178

   PDF

This book observes the idea of race as a false representation for the cause of disease. Race-based medicine, an emerging field in pharmacology, aims to create a specialty market based on racial groups. Within this market, the drug BiDil set a precedent in this area of medicine targeting African Americans as its first racial group. Consequently, selecting African Americans as a “starter group” led to ethical questions regarding the motive behind race-based medicine within the context of the larger treatment of blacks in American medical history. This book therefore links medicine and American eugenics, examines race-based medicine’s influence on the perception of the black body, traces the influence of BiDil’s approval on the resurgence of race-based medicine, and assesses the black church’s response to race-based medicine using black liberation theology as a means to social justice.

• race-based medicine
• eugenics
• biblical criticism
• black hardiness
• Black Church
• racial fatalism
• medical stigmata
• Biological Theories of Race
• Race, Gender, and Cultural Bioethics
• Racialized Medicine
• Medical Experimentation on Black Americans
• Biology and Race in the Twentieth Century

“Medical Stigmata encourages readers to apply similar hermeneutics to clinical contexts, using scripture to challenge the determinist narratives that pervade medicine and its adjacent industries.” (Audrey Farley, Marginalia, marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org, October 18, 2019)

• Philosophy and Religious Studies, Seton Hall University, South Orange, USA

  Kirk A. Johnson

Dr. Kirk A. Johnson teaches at Seton Hall University and Berkeley College in New Jersey, US. He is a member of the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities and The New York Academy of Medicine. He serves as a member of the Atlantic Health Systems Bioethics Committee and was formerly Assistant Director of the Medical Humanities program at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, US.

Policies and ethics