457 - Black Public Health
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 18 April 2022
⏱️ 13 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Black physicians and social scientists connected racism to a host of health consequences. Dr. Ayah Nuriddin, a Princeton scholar of race and science in this era, talks with Dr. Josh Sharfstein about this emergence of Black public health and its efforts to push back against prevailing messages. Long underappreciated, these insights are now front and center in discussions of health equity.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Season 5 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:13.0 | I'm Joshua Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former health commissioner here in Baltimore, Maryland. |
| 0:21.7 | Our goal with this podcast is to bring scientific evidence and experience to shed light on critical |
| 0:27.5 | health issues. If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health |
| 0:33.0 | question at jhhhu.edu. That's public health question at jh.u.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:41.9 | Dr. Ayah Nurideen is a scholar at Princeton University of Race and Science in the early 20th century. |
| 0:48.5 | We discuss one focus of her work from that era, the collective efforts of black public health officials and |
| 0:55.0 | physicians to improve the health of black communities, which she has written about as black public |
| 1:00.7 | health. Let's listen. Dr. Ayah Nuradine, thank you so much for joining me in public health on |
| 1:07.8 | call. You are a historian and among the different topics that you |
| 1:12.3 | have studied, is Black Public Health. And I'd like to just start by asking to tell us the story |
| 1:19.6 | of Black Public Health. Where I begin the story of Black Public Health, I think I would argue that |
| 1:24.5 | other folks might pinpoint this at a different moment than I do. |
| 1:34.3 | But I focus really heavily on the late 19th and early 20th century and the ways that black physicians and activists and social scientists become concerned about the different kinds of |
| 1:39.9 | health inequalities they're observing, especially among poor African Americans. |
| 1:44.0 | There was really high |
| 1:45.3 | rates of infectious disease, morbidity and mortality, really high maternal and infant mortality. |
| 1:51.4 | And they become really invested in understanding what the causes of that are. And I would argue |
| 1:56.9 | that that's kind of the emergence of a black public health that's driven by black people |
| 2:01.2 | in their interests. Also, a lot of this work is really invested in disproving assumptions based |
| 2:07.6 | in racial science about black inferiority. So you have these black physicians and social scientists |
| 2:12.6 | who are studying, you know, the causes of health inequality and why there are such high rates of disease and such high |
... |
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