HSL Monthly Book Displays

Explore the actively growing and vibrant collections at the Health Sciences Library by visiting our monthly book display. This display sits on top of our reference shelf and features many of our newest acquisitions while following a theme. The display has been going on since June 2023, and has included monthly themes like “History of Medicine,” “Cardiology,” “Spooky Skeletons (orthopedics),” and “Reproductive Justice.” Enjoy this feature of this month’s book display!

February 2025: Black History Month

Say Anarcha : a young woman, a devious surgeon, and the harrowing birth of modern women’s health
In 1846, a young surgeon, J. Marion Sims (“The Father of Gynecology”), began several years of experimental surgeries on a young enslaved woman known as Anarcha (“The Mother of Gynecology”). This series of procedures – performed without anesthesia and resulting in Anarcha’s so-called “cure” – forever altered the path of women’s health. Through extensive research, author J. C. Hallman has unearthed the first evidence ever found of Anarcha’s life that did not come from Sims’s suspect reports. With incredible tenacity, Hallman traced Anarcha’s path from her beginnings on a Southern plantation to the backyard clinic where she was subjected to scores of painful surgical experiments, to her years after in Richmond and New York City, and to her final resting place in a lonely Virginia forest.

We’ll fight it out here : a history of the ongoing struggle for health equity
The authors tell the story of the Association of Minority Health Professions Schools and the hard-won influence that it built in American politics and health care. This story speaks to the history of Black people’s exclusion from medical fields and to racial inequities in health.

Taylor and Elbuluk’s color atlas and synopsis for skin of color
An essential component of dermatology training is the accurate identification of skin diseases in all patients. Taylor and Elbuluk’s Color Atlas and Synopsis for Skin of Color is designed to help you recognize the differences in disease presentation amongst patients with lighter and darker skin, thus improving diagnostic accuracy and lessening the burden of disease for patients of color.

The Black Angels : the untold story of the nurses who helped cure tuberculosis
Spanning the Great Depression and moving through World War II and beyond, this story follows the intrepid young women, the “Black Angels,” who, for twenty years, risked their lives working under dreadful conditions while caring for the city’s poorest-1,800 souls languishing in wards, waiting to die or become “guinea pigs” for experimental (often deadly) drugs … The Black Angels recovers the voices of these extraordinary women and puts them at the center of this riveting story celebrating their legacy and spirit of survival.

Caring for equality : a concise history of African American health and healthcare
African Americans today continue to suffer disproportionately from heart disease, diabetes, and other health problems. In Caring for Equality David McBride chronicles the struggle by African Americans and their white allies to improve poor black health conditions as well as inadequate medical care—caused by slavery, racism, and discrimination—since the arrival of African slaves in America.

Invisible visits : Black middle-class women in the American healthcare system
Invisible Visits analyzes how middle-class Black women navigate the complexities of dealing with doctors in this environment. It challenges the idea that race and gender discrimination-particularly in healthcare settings-is a thing of the past, and questions the persistent myth that discrimination only affects poor racial minorities. In so doing, the book expands our understanding of how Black middle-class women are treated when they go to the doctor, why they continue to face inequities in securing proper medical care, and what strategies they use to fight for the best treatment (as well as the consequential toll on their health).

Ancestral genomics : African American health in the age of precision medicine
Race is a social reality, not a biological one. Yet African Americans are poorly served by even advanced genetic medicine because it is built on European DNA. Constance Hilliard explores the benefits and drawbacks of racial heuristics in medicine and argues for nonessentializing methods of harnessing genomic science on behalf of people of color.

Under the Skin: Racism, Inequality, and the Health of a Nation
In Under the Skin, Linda Villarosa lays bare the forces in the American health-care system and in American society that cause Black people to ‘live sicker and die quicker’ compared to their white counterparts. Today’s medical texts and instruments still carry fallacious slavery-era assumptions that Black bodies are fundamentally different from white bodies. Study after study of medical settings show worse treatment and outcomes for Black patients. Black people live in dirtier, more polluted communities due to environmental racism and neglect from all levels of government. And, most powerfully, Villarosa describes the new understanding that coping with the daily scourge of racism ages Black people prematurely. Anchored by unforgettable human stories and offering incontrovertible proof, Under the Skin is dramatic, tragic, and necessary reading.