In a wide ranging analysis that moves from individual patient cases to the compassionate yet distanced professionalism of health care specialists to the level of national policy, Carolyn Moxley Rouse uncovers the cultural assumptions that shape the quality and delivery of care for sickle cell patients. She reveals a clinical world fraught with uncertainties over how to treat black patients given resource limitations and ambivalence. Learn more and buy the book on Amazon.

Shirley A. Hill examines how low-income African American mothers with children suffering from this hereditary, incurable, and chronically painful disease, react to the diagnosis and manage their family’s health care.  Learn more and purchase the book on Amazon.

Considered a classic in the field, Troy Duster’s Backdoor to Eugenics was a groundbreaking book that grappled with the social and political implications of the new genetic technologies. Completely updated and revised, this work will be welcomed back into print as we struggle to understand the pros and cons of prenatal detection of birth defects; gene therapies; growth hormones; and substitute genetic answers to problems linked with such groups as Jews, Scandanavians, Native American, Arabs and African Americans. Duster’s book has never been more timely.  Learn more and purchase the book on Amazon.

People’s Science uncovers the tension between scientific innovation and social equality, taking the reader inside California’s 2004 stem cell initiative, the first of many state referenda on scientific research, to consider the lives it has affected.

Authors: Keith Wailco & Stephen Pemberton

In this captivating account, historians Keith Wailoo and Stephen Pemberton reveal how Tay-Sachs, cystic fibrosis, and sickle cell disease―fraught with ethnic and racial meanings for many Americans―became objects of biological fascination and crucibles of social debate.

Author:  Keith Wailoo

This groundbreaking book chronicles the history of sickle cell anemia in the United States, tracing its transformation from an “invisible” malady to a powerful, yet contested, cultural symbol of African American pain and suffering.