‘A Change of Heart’: Racial Politics, Scientific Metaphor and Coverage of 1968 Interracial Heart Transplants in the African American Press

Posted in Articles, Communications/Media Studies, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive, United States on 2016-05-30 16:40Z by Steven

‘A Change of Heart’: Racial Politics, Scientific Metaphor and Coverage of 1968 Interracial Heart Transplants in the African American Press

Social History of Medicine
Published online: 2016-05-26
DOI: 10.1093/shm/hkw052

Maya Overby Koretzky
Johns Hopkins Institute for the History of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland

This paper explores the African American response to an interracial heart transplant in 1968 through a close reading of the black newspaper press. This methodological approach provides a window into African American perceptions of physiological difference between the races, or lack thereof, as it pertained to both personal identity and race politics. Coverage of the first interracial heart transplant, which occurred in apartheid South Africa, was multifaceted. Newspapers lauded the transplant as evidence of physiological race equality while simultaneously mobilising the language of differing ‘black’ and ‘white’ hearts to critique racist politics through the metaphor of a ‘change of heart’. While interracial transplant created the opportunity for such political commentary, its material reality—potential exploitation of black bodies for white gain—was increasingly a cause for concern, especially after a contentious heart transplant from a black to a white man in May 1968 in the American South.

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Medical Experimentation and Race in the Eighteenth-century Atlantic World

Posted in Articles, Caribbean/Latin America, Health/Medicine/Genetics, History, Media Archive, Social Science on 2013-07-27 17:53Z by Steven

Medical Experimentation and Race in the Eighteenth-century Atlantic World

Social History of Medicine
Volume 26, Issue 3 (August 2013)
pages 364-382
DOI: 10.1093/shm/hkt011

Londa Schiebinger, The John L. Hinds Professor of History of Science
Stanford University

This article examines medical experimentation with humans in the Atlantic world. Physicians in this period tended to use bodies interchangeably in medical trials; subjects were scarce and, for the most part, used with extreme care. Experimentalists in this period, however, faced a paradox. In the second half of the eighteenth century naturalists across Europe began focusing attention on what they perceived to be racial differences. At the same time medical experimentalists required that human bodies be fully interchangeable if results were to hold universally. The dilemma, then, was this: on the one hand, physicians tended to emphasize racial difference with respect to the science of race; on the other hand, they assumed uniformity across humans with respect to developing drug therapies. It was in this context that important questions arose about whether experiments done among Caribbean slave populations were valid for Europeans.

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