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Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine. Uché Blackstock, MD, 294 pp., Viking There are many memorable books published each year that can be rightfully termed potboilers or page turners, but few within the genre of academic medicine. The narrative storytelling alone makes this book the exception.
Behold the personal narrative of Uché Blackstock, whose given name is a derivative of the Igbo word meaning‘ God’ s will’. She and her twin sister Oni Blackstock, whose forename translates in Yoruban to‘ one born in a sacred place’, are legacy graduates of Harvard Medical School. Their mother, Dr. Dale Gloria Blackstock predated them at Harvard. ABWP co-founder Dr. Jessie Sherrod was their mother’ s classmate.
SPOILER ALERT: Legacy may seem a cautionary tale. An über-smart person full of ardent passion receives a series of wakeup calls that overturn the conventional wisdom that a Harvard Medical School education is a platinum ticket to unbridled fame and fortune.
The Blackstock family dynamic is quite compelling as Uché tells it. Dad is originally from Jamaica and Mom grew up in the same Brooklyn neighborhood where she decides to establish her practice. Throughout much of the narrative, the parents work closely together to keep their impressionable daughters shielded from the allure of the streets.
Uché puts a fine point to that aspect in her description of how she and Oni grew up following their role model mom around, observing her work while crafting the blueprint for their own lives. Their mother wasn’ t high-profile about her status as a well-trained professional in working class community.“ She wasn’ t taking care of patients; she was tending to her neighbors,” notes Uché.
The marvelous prospect of a matriarch imparting all her mother-wit to her eager daughters throughout their lives is halted as Dale Gloria dies when the girls are 19 years old. Mom is 47. Though she has actively prepared the twins for such a happenstance, the void in their lives is still a gaping crevasse. In addition to the extreme ache of the unexpected, Uché and Oni find themselves doing what people who have lost a parent early in life are prone to do: every decision, whether personal or professional, is run through the lens of mom’ s high expectations.
Section and chapter titles offer an interesting insight as to what content is coming next, e. g., The Original Dr. Blackstock( a portrait of Gloria Dale), Everything We
Lost( the damage of losing a parent before the children have been fully honed), A Tale of Two Emergency Rooms( observations that contrast patient treatment at the private and public emergency rooms of the hospital attached to the NYU School of Medicine), a place where Uché describes in rich detail how she experienced the shocking wake up call.
The point of no return moment that shapes her current professional priorities is her stint as the NYU School of Medicine’ s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion officer. Exchanges with white faculty colleagues and the university administration convince her that the DEI position at NYU is mostly window dressing designed to check off a box rather than building a sustainable bridge for qualified students in need.
Her concerns about healthcare disparities that emerged watching her mother minister to patients in her neighborhood have now taken a front and center position. By Uché’ s calculus with her marriage having crumbled, and two small children that she and her ex-husband coparent, there is no turning back.
This book is thought-provoking in its chronicling of how Uché becomes radicalized as she examines her disillusionment. Her awakening process is very systematic. She not only becomes an eyewitness to how health care disparities occur, she is also up to date on the dangers of the dismal reactions of the top-level movers and shakers within her crosshairs.“ The culture of medicine is unforgiving,” she notes ruefully.
She is also timely. A recent Los Angeles Times article pointing out the racial bias attached to false pulse oximeter readings more common in Black patients has prompted concern. A lawsuit seems right out of Legacy’ s playbook for fighting healthcare inequalities. Plenty to ponder in this detailed shot across the bow of Big Public Health.
CDU College of Medicine | PG. 39