injustice in health is the most shocking and the most inhumane

Black Man in a White Coat:

 A Doctor's Reflections on Race and Medicine

By Damon Tweedy

"Of all the forms of inequality," Martin Luther King Jr. told a gathering Of the Medical Committee for Human Rights in 1966,  injustice in health is the most shocking and the most inhumane

medicine. My goal as I headed for Durham was much less ambitious and civic-minded. I simply wanted to make my parents proud of me and set myself up to earn a good living. Race-based concerns ranked low on my list of priorities. But my professors couldn't stop talking about race. During my early months, as they taught us about diseases both common and rare, they inevitably cited the demographics, explaining which dis- orders were more common in the young or old, women or men, and one racial group or another. When they spoke about race, they would sometimes mention Asians, Hispanics, and Native Americans. Yet invariably, as it always seems to in America, their analysis came down to comparing blacks and whites. It seemed that no matter the body part or organ system affected, the lecturers would sound a familiar refrain: "It's more common in blacks than in whites.".