Culture, history, race and politics all have played a significant hand in creating today’s health-care disparities in America.
Health-policy historian Keith Wailoo, Ph.D., will share insights in the Assembly Series lecture “How Cancer Crossed the Color Line: Race and Disease in America” at 4 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 11, in Rebstock Hall, Room 215.
Wailoo, the Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of History at Rutgers University, is the director of the Center for Race and Ethnicity with a joint appointment in the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research. He also taught for nine years at the University of North Carolina.
He earned a doctorate in history and sociology of science from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992 and a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Yale University in 1984.
Wailoo’s research focuses on the role of technology in 20th-century medicine. He explores how numerous forces, including changing medical relations with the pharmaceutical industry and the federal government — as well as attitudes toward particular patient groups — have shaped ideas about blood, blood disease and patients with these diseases.
His first book, “Drawing Blood: Technology and Disease Identity in Twentieth-Century America,” received the 1997 Arthur Viseltear Award from the American Public Health Association.
Wailoo has received several other awards and grants, including the prestigious James S. McDonnell Centennial Fellowship in the History of Science in 1999.
The event is free and open to the public. For more information, call 935-4620.