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Deadly Medicine Today: The Impossible Denials of Racial Medicine
Author(s) -
King C. Richard
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
transforming anthropology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.325
H-Index - 9
eISSN - 1548-7466
pISSN - 1051-0559
DOI - 10.1525/tran.2007.15.1.77
Subject(s) - racism , ideology , context (archaeology) , nazism , the holocaust , relevance (law) , power (physics) , race (biology) , sociology , law , political science , environmental ethics , criminology , history , gender studies , politics , philosophy , physics , archaeology , quantum mechanics
This essay offers a critical review of Deadly Medicine, a special exhibit staged at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which is dedicated to clarifying the role of medicine and the human sciences in the racist policies and genocidal practices of the Nazi regime. Throughout, the discussion uses the content of the special exhibit to reflect on the relationships between ideology, racism, and medicine in the past and the present. Probing the broader context surrounding the staging of Deadly Medicine, it reflects on the ongoing relevance of its key themes, namely race, exploitation, and destructiveness, as well as the articulations it silences, particularly those among Whiteness, medicine, and power. In the end, it concludes that the special exhibit, like prevailing discourses about medicine more generally, problematically distances medicine from the creation and consequences of racism.