Malicious Intent

David Barton Smith

Description

“Do we want to perpetuate a Jim Crow health system?” A brilliant, idealistic physician named Jean Cowsert asked that question in Alabama in 1966. Her answer was no—and soon after, she died under suspicious circumstances. Unearthing the truth of Cowsert’s life and death is a central concern of David Barton Smith’s Malicious Intent. Unearthing the grim history of our health care system is another.

Race-related disparities in American death rates, exacerbated once again by the COVID-19 pandemic, have persisted since the birth of the modern US medical system a century ago. A unique but perpetually unequal history has prevented the United States from providing the kind of health care assurances that are taken for granted in other industrialized nations. The underlying story is one of political, medical, and bureaucratic machinations, all motivated by a deliberate Jim Crow systemic design. In Malicious Intent, David Barton Smith traces the Jean Cowsert story and the cold case of her death as a through line to explain the construction and fulfillment of an unequal health care system that would rather sacrifice many than provide for Black Americans.

Cowsert’s suspicious death came at a key moment in the struggle for universal health care in the wealthiest country on earth. Malicious Intent is a history of those failed efforts and a story of selective amnesia about one doctor’s death and the movement she fought for.
The headlines in the local press during at the end of January 1967 focused on the suspicious death of a prominent white physician in Mobile, Alabama. Found dead with a bullet in her chest on her front steps, it was quickly ruled an accident. Her life and death were soon lost even to local memory.

Beneath the surface, that death, was but one of many lost to memory in a struggle begun by 19th century abolitionist. All these murders became unsolved cold cases.

Healthcare in the United States is the “ultimate cold case.” It captures all that is unique about this nation - one whose utopian vision of democracy has kindled flames all over the world but has avoided confronting its own racial realities.

Most answers to these two questions blame “structural racism” but get vague in describing what it is.  While the watershed Civil Rights Act of 1964  prohibited “racial discrimination,” it never defined what that was.  Current advocates of “antiracism” avoid confronting the “structural” part.  They argue that it is just an easy excuse to do nothing.  Most focus on “organizational culture” and all the conscious and unconscious biases that shape hiring, promotion and treatment decisions.  
 
Preface
Part I. Race and Recovery of Memory
1. A Forgotten Death
2. Jim Crow Medicine
3. Death of Universal Health Care
Part II. Mobile
4. Old Wounds
5. Civil Rights Struggles
6. Local Medicine
Part III. Jean Cowsert, M.D.
7. Preparation
8. An Irresistible Force Meets an Immovable Object
9. Eliminating the Jim Crow Cages

Acknowledgments     
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Health Issues
• Civil Rights
• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Jim Crow laws
• Hospital
• Disparity
• Civil and political rights
• Disease
• Health
• Medicare
• History
• Jim Crow
• Medicaid
• Plessy v. Ferguson
• Brown v. Board of Education
• Race

Informations

• Publié par: Vanderbilt University Press
• Date de parution: 15 octobre 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780826506153
• Langue: English

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