Book Review: Black Man in a White Coat: A Doctor’s Reflections on Race and Medicine by Damon Tweedy
Black Man in a White Coat: A Doctor’s Reflections on Race and Medicine by Damon Tweedy
Publisher: Picador
Release Date: September 8, 2015
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Publisher’s Description:
One doctor’s passionate and profound memoir of his experience grappling with race, bias, and the unique health problems of black Americans
When Damon Tweedy begins medical school, he envisions a bright future where his segregated, working-class background will become largely irrelevant. Instead, he finds that he has joined a new world where race is front and center. The recipient of a scholarship designed to increase black student enrollment, Tweedy soon meets a professor who bluntly questions whether he belongs in medical school, a moment that crystallizes the challenges he will face throughout his career. Making matters worse, in lecture after lecture the common refrain for numerous diseases resounds, “More common in blacks than whites.”
Black Man in a White Coat examines the complex ways in which both black doctors and patients must navigate the difficult and often contradictory terrain of race and medicine. As Tweedy transforms from student to practicing physician, he discovers how often race influences his encounters with patients. Through their stories, he illustrates the complex social, cultural, and economic factors at the root of most health problems in the black community. These issues take on greater meaning when Tweedy is himself diagnosed with a chronic disease far more common among black people. In this powerful, moving, and deeply empathic book, Tweedy explores the challenges confronting black doctors, and the disproportionate health burdens faced by black patients, ultimately seeking a way forward to better treatment and more compassionate care.
Black Man in a White Coat is Damon Tweedy’s memoir of his experience as a black man getting into medical school up through becoming a practicing physician. At the very beginning of medical school, one of his professors mistook him for a maintenance worker even though he was dressed nicely and had been in his class for a month. Tweedy recounts his embarrassment, even though it was the professor who should have been embarrassed. He also talks about the mixed emotions he felt about a form of affirmative action being one of the reasons that he was admitted to Duke medical school.
Once he starts interacting with patients, he has a variety of experiences related to race that make him aware of the issues that both black doctors and black patients face. Some of them aren’t too surprising (although still horrible), like the white patient who didn’t want a black doctor. Some were very surprising to me. For instance, he encountered a black patient who didn’t want a black doctor. Tweedy backs up his personal examples with research that shows whatever issues he encounters exist on a larger scale. They are not isolated incidents experienced only by him.
Tweedy writes about medical information in an accessible manner with a conversational tone. My eyes were opened to race related issues in the medical field that I hadn’t previously considered. This is a great memoir that I highly recommend.
(I received a complementary review copy of this book.)
