This Week in Black History, Society, and Culture
"This Week in Black History, Society, and Culture" is a monthly podcast produced by Dr. Hettie V. Williams Professor of History in the Department of History and Anthropology at Monmouth University. Williams is the author of several essays, articles, book chapters and the author/editor of seven books. Her research interests include African American intellectual and cultural history, women's history, and race/ethnic studies. She is also the former director of the Trotter Institute for the Study of Black Culture at UMass Boston. Williams periodically interviews scholars, authors, activists, and community leaders on matters related to the history, society, and culture of Black and African American communities in the United States (U.S.) and the world. These podcast episodes are on a variety of subjects including, but not limited to, higher education, economics, criminal justice, reparations, mental health, history, science, gender, popular culture, women, and politics. A new episode will be released monthly on Monday mornings from September to May during each academic term.
This Week in Black History, Society, and Culture
Masters of Health: Slavery and Racial Thinking in Medical Schools
In this episode Dr. Hettie V. Williams is in conversation with Christopher Willoughby. Williams is Associate Professor of African American history in the Department of History at Monmouth University. Willoughby is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the History of Medicine and Health at Pitzer College and the author of Masters of Health: Racial Science and Slavery in U.S. Medical Schools published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2022. He is also the editor of Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery. This conversation focuses primarily on Willoughby’s Masters of Health and the disturbing history of race, medicine, and health in the U.S. White supremacist thinking and racial science permeated American medical schools alongside the rise of modern medicine through the era of racial slavery. Willoughby traces this history in startling detail and including some conversation about the misuse and abuse of Black bodies in medical science down to the present.
