Medicine by the People

Most histories of medicine centre doctors. Yet these narratives underplay the role that ordinary people have on medicine and public health. In colonial America, Black people’s knowledge led to smallpox inoculations, stymying that epidemic. Midwives, more plentiful than doctors, delivered babies more successfully. The Black community of the early 1900s educated the public on preventing tuberculosis. In the last half of the twentieth century, the Young Lords fought for better sanitation and increased medical infrastructure in their East Harlem neighbourhood and queer people’s activism pushed the federal government for HIV/AIDS research. Grassroots community care has always been a hidden tradition at the cutting edge of medicine.Medicine by the People reveals that the history of American healthcare is, at its heart, a struggle over who gets to tell the story of illness.