Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine - Vocabulary

Vocabulary flashcards covering key terms, historical reports, policies, and sociomedical concepts discussed in the excerpt from 'Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine'.

Structurally Competent and Culturally Responsive Care

An approach to medical evaluation that considers the entire complex nature of a patient's background and the social context in which they live, work, and pray.

Racial Concordance

A shared racial background between a clinician and patient, which has been shown to improve health outcomes, patient satisfaction, and trust, particularly among Black patients.

Structural Competency

A medical training paradigm introduced by Dr. Jonathan M. Metzl and Dr. Helena Hansen in 2014 to train health professionals to recognize and respond to the impact of upstream structural factors, such as poverty and systemic racism, on health.

Susan Smith McKinney Steward Medical Society

A local organization of Black women physicians named after the third Black woman to earn a medical degree in the United States and the first in New York State.

Flexner Report

A landmark 1910 evaluation of US medical education authored by Abraham Flexner that standardized medical school criteria, leading directly to the closure of five out of seven Black medical schools in the United States.

Alpha Omega Alpha (AOA)

A medical school honor society that often influences entry into selective medical specialties, whose election practices have historically gewesen embedded in racial bias.

Redlining

A discriminatory practice originating in the 1930s where federal agencies color-coded neighborhoods in red to mark them as high risk for mortgage lenders, systematically denying Black Americans homeownership opportunities and wealth accumulation.

Community Reinvestment Act

A 1977 federal law enacted to encourage banks and financial institutions to lend to borrowers and meet the credit needs in low-income neighborhoods.

Supermarket Redlining

The tendency of major supermarket chains to locate stores in affluent suburbs rather than low-income urban neighborhoods, creating food deserts in predominantly Black and Latinx communities.

Weathering

A concept developed by Dr. Arline Geronimus describing the premature biological aging and health degradation of Black individuals caused by the cumulative stress of enduring constant systemic racism.

Institutional Untrustworthiness

A concept reframing Black patients' reluctance to engage with health-care systems not as personal distrust, but as a rational response to institutions that have historically perpetrated abuses against Black communities.

Phrenology

A debunked 19th-century pseudoscience promoted by figures like Dr. Charles Caldwell, which claimed that skull shape and bumps indicated mental capabilities and was used to argue that Black people were biologically inferior.

Drapetomania

A pseudoscientific mental disorder invented in the 1850s by Dr. Samuel Cartwright, who claimed it was an illness that caused enslaved Black people to flee captivity.