Gender, Ethnicity, and Health Research
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Reinventing the Sexes: The Biomedical Construction of Femininity and Masculinity
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Health Care Disparities and the LGBT Population
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Health Disparities, Diversity, and Inclusion
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Health Disparities in the United States: Social class, race, ethnicity, and health
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Just Medicine: A Cure for Racial Inequality in American Health Care
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Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care
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Video
Web Resources & Articles
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Books
Bad Blood: the Tuskegee syphilis experiment
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Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy
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The Tuskegee Syphilis Study: The Real Story and Beyond
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Tuskegee's Truths: Rethinking the Tuskegee Syphilis Study
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Articles
Webpages & Archives
Movies & Videos
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
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Now a major motion picture from HBO® starring Oprah Winfrey and Rose Byrne. Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells--taken without her knowledge--became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first "immortal" human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they'd weigh more than 50 million metric tons--as much as a hundred Empire State Buildings. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vacci≠ uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb's effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions. Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave. Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the "colored" ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henrietta's small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia--a land of wooden slave quarters, faith healings, and voodoo--to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells. Henrietta's family did not learn of her "immortality" until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family--past and present--is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of. Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family--especially Henrietta's daughter Deborah, who was devastated to learn about her mother's cells. She was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Did it hurt her when researchers infected her cells with viruses and shot them into space? What happened to her sister, Elsie, who died in a mental institution at the age of fifteen? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn't her children afford health insurance? Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.
Websites
Movie & Videos
Breeding Contempt: the History of Coerced Sterilization in the United States
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Human Sterilization : the History of the Sexual Sterilization Movement
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The Sterilization Movement and Global Fertility in the Twentieth Century
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Articles
An American Health Dilemma: Medical History of African Americans and the Problem of Race ; Beginnings to 1900
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Black and Blue: The Origins and Consequences of Medical Racism
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Bones in the Basement: Postmortem in Nineteenth-century Medical Training
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The History of the Negro in Medicine
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Infectious Fear: Politics, Disease, and the Health Effects of Segregation
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Killing the Black Body
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Making a Place for Ourselves: The Black Hospital Movement, 1920-1945
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Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present
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Medicine and Slavery: The Diseases and Health Care of Blacks in Antebellum Virginia
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The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War
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The Treatment: The Story of Those Who Died in the Cincinnati Radiation Tests
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What the Eyes Don't See: A story of crisis, resistance, and hope in an American city
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