An American Health Dilemma -- Copyright -- Contents -- List of Figures and Tables -- Foreword -- Acknowledgments -- Preface -- Introduction -- On the Origins of a Race- and Class-Based System -- Goals and Objectives -- Methodology -- Background for Reassessing Race, Class, and Health Care in the United States -- Part I The Background -- Chapter 1 Race, Biology, and Health Care in the United States: Reassessing a Relationship -- On Race: Examining an Enigma -- The Evolution of a Racially Unequal Health System -- Race Explored: A Life Sciences/Health Care Perspective -- Race: An Intellectual History -- Race: A History of Science Perspective -- Race, Medicine, and Science: Ancient Relationships -- Race, Medicine, and Science: The Middle Ages -- Race, Medicine, and Science during the Renaissance and Reformation -- Race, Medicine, and Science in the Age of Reason and Enlightenment -- Nineteenth-Century Race, Science, and Medicine -- The Social Sciences and Twentieth-Century Race, Science, and Medicine -- Race, Class, Ethnic Politics, and Health Care -- Evaluative Benchmarks of Black Progress -- Strategies to Overcome a Dream Deferred: Race, Justice, and Equity in Health Care As We Enter the Twenty-first Century -- Chapter 2 Race, Medicine, and Society: From Prehistoric to English Colonial Times -- Ancient Western Medicine and Health Care: Race and Class Considerations in Predecessor Health Systems -- Ancient Greece: Establishing Western Science and Hierarchies -- Roman Medicine: Legions, Slaves, and Public Health -- The Middle Ages -- The Arabic Legacy of Race and Slavery -- The Scientific and Medical Renaissance: Inauspicious Racial and Medical-Social Roots -- Black Health before and during the Slave Trade: Beginnings of a Health Deficit Legacy -- Part II Race, Medicine, and Health in the North American Colonies and the Early U.S. Republic.

Chapter 3 Black Health in the North American English Colonies, 1619-1730 -- A Background with Iberian Roots -- The North American English Colonies -- Black Slave Health: Effects of the Diaspora -- Origin of a Race- and Class-Based Health System -- An Embryonic Healing Profession -- A Black Healing Tradition -- Chapter 4 Black Health in the Republican Era, 1731-1812 -- Seeds of a Multitiered, Unequal Health System -- Race, Medicine, and Health Care: Reassessing the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries -- The "Hottentot Venus" and Nineteenth-Century Racial Science -- A "Slave Health Deficit" Institutionalized: 1731-1812 -- An Emerging Dual Health System in Black and White -- Race Medicine: Real or Imagined Differences? -- The Black Medical Profession: 1731-1812 -- The White Medical Profession, 1731-1812 -- Part III Race, Medicine, and Health in the United States from 1812 to 1900 -- Chapter 5 Black Health and the Jacksonian and Antebellum Periods, 1812-1861 -- Growth, Change, and Manifest Destiny -- Beginnings of a Health System: Black Subjugation, Dependency, and Separate Development -- A Unique Health System Culture's Modus Operandi: Sensationalism, Pragmatism, and Race and Class Exploitation for Scientific Advance -- A New Perspective on a Medical Icon -- Entrenchment of a Black Health Deficit -- Stewardship Denied: White Medicine in Jacksonian and Antebellum America -- The Health Professions' Color and Gender Lines -- A Slave Hospital on a "Good" Plantation -- Chapter 6 The Civil War, Reconstruction, Post-Reconstruction, and Black Health, 1861-1900 -- Black Health 1861-1900: A Roller-Coaster Ride to Nowhere -- The Civil War and Black Health -- Black Health and the Reconstruction Era -- Black Health in the Gilded Age -- Black Health Enters the Progressive Era -- Health System Heal Thyself -- The White Medical Profession Comes of Age.

The Black Medical Profession: Practicing behind the "Veil" -- Health Policy Born of Pragmatism -- A Mixed Legacy -- Conclusion: Laying the Foundations of a Dual and Unequal Health System -- Notes -- Select Bibliography -- A Note on Sources -- Index.