LEGACY

A Black physician reflects on her career in medicine and the many inequities of American health care.

During their childhood in Brooklyn, Blackstock and her twin sister often played with their mother’s medical bag. The first Dr. Blackstock had grown up on welfare before becoming a respected nephrologist. The author and her sister both followed in their mother’s footsteps, attending Harvard Medical School, the “school’s first Black mother-daughter legacy graduates.” At Harvard, Blackstock first saw how racism manifests in medicine. “A lot of the time,” she writes, “it wasn’t as much a case of what our professors were teaching us as what they were leaving out”—namely, the “exploitation of Black people for the purposes of medical education.” Examples include Henrietta Lacks, a poor Black woman whose cervical tissue was removed without her consent and used for study and profit, or the men of the infamous Tuskegee experiment, where researchers left syphilis untreated among Black sharecroppers to “prove” that Black people had “primitive nervous systems.” But Blackstock’s true education came later, during her fellowship at NYU, when she became a practicing physician at two emergency centers: Tisch, a private hospital, and Bellevue, a public hospital. The two hospitals were next door to each other but worlds apart. Tisch was “well-oiled” and “highly resourced,” and the patients were “wealthy, insured…[and] mostly white.” Bellevue was “chaotic” and understaffed, and the patient population largely consisted of Black and brown people who had “slipped through the cracks of a system that was simply not built to serve them.” Blackstock eloquently describes her journey from idealistic resident, to burned-out fellow, to disillusioned professor at NYU, where she was asked to take a leadership role in the Office of Diversity Affairs, a position that ultimately felt “empty and performative.” Though occasionally dry, this is an important story.

A timely and persuasive memoir.