Just Medicine: A Cure for Racial Inequality in American Health Care

With Just Medicine, Dayna Bowen Matthew provides a critique of the contemporary healthcare system and a reflection on the long legacy of racial discrimination in the US, with a focus on healthcare and civil rights. The book emerges from a socio-historical context shaped by the long history of racial exclusion and systemic inequity that continues to manifest in modern institutions, despite the progress made during the Civil Rights Movement (a protest movement organized by Black American citizens fighting against segregation and discrimination that lasted from 1954 until 1964).

As Matthew notes in Just Medicine, the exclusion of African Americans and other racially marginalized groups from unbiased healthcare access is historically interlaced with the legacy of slavery, segregation, and discriminatory policies. Throughout centuries, hospitals were segregated, Black patients often received substandard care, and medical experimentation on Black bodies without consent was widespread. Matthew’s emphasis on implicit bias in Just Medicine reflects the ways in which these historical patterns of discrimination have evolved into more subtle but still pervasive forms of exclusion and unequal treatment. Even after the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Medicare in 1965, which included provisions against racial, gender, and nationality-based discrimination, studies that Matthew cites at length in her book demonstrate that the US healthcare system has continued to perpetuate racial disparities, albeit in less overt ways.