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Divided review: Why we must eliminate racism from Western healthcare

A legacy of racism in Western medicine means healthcare is badly in need of decolonising. Annabel Sowemimo's book sets out why

By Layal Liverpool

5 April 2023

NEW YORK, NY - APRIL 17: A statue of J. Marion Sims, a surgeon celebrated by many as the father of modern gynecology, is driven away in a Parks Department truck after being taken down from its pedestal at Central Park and East 103rd Street on April 17, 2018 in New York City. A New York City panel decided to move the controversial statue after groups demanded its removal as many of Sims medical breakthroughs came from experimenting on black slaves without anesthesia. The statue will be relocated in Green-Wood Cemetery in Windsor Terrace, where Sims is buried. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

A statue of US doctor James Marion Sims was removed after protests

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Divided
Annabel Sowemimo (Wellcome Collection)

THERE is a paradox at the heart of Western medicine. It is built on a legacy of white doctors and scientists obsessed with skin colour, who were striving to demonstrate the inferiority of people with skin darker than theirs to justify European colonisation and transatlantic slavery. This persists today in the form of racial biases in medicine, which contribute to widely documented health disparities.

Yet Western medicine also ignores darker skin, from medical …

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