Equal parts memoir and exposé, Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine explores Dr. Uché Blackstock's upbringing and medical career while shining a light on racial inequalities in the American healthcare system.
Following in the footsteps of their mother, Uché Blackstock and her twin sister both attended Harvard Medical School, becoming the first two Black mother-daughter duos to graduate from the school. Both sisters continued on to careers as doctors in high-need areas of their native New York City. But the racial healthcare disparities long present in the United States, including higher mortality rates in childbirth and lower life expectancies for Black people - the product of centuries of racism and discrimination in medicine, policy, and beyond - only became clear to Blackstock as an adult. Clearer still were the systemic barriers causing a dearth of other Black women in medicine, who today make up just 2% of all doctors in the United States.
Now a full-time advocate for racial equality in healthcare, Blackstock recounts her own story, her mother's story, and that of the injustices embedded in the American healthcare system in Legacy, shining a vital light on the work that still needs to be done to open up medicine to aspiring doctors of color and make healthcare fair for all patients.
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