Bullitt Club Lecture on Racial Disparities in Health Care

The next joint meeting of UNC’s Bullitt History of Medicine Club and Duke’s Trent History of Medicine Society will be Tuesday, December 9, 2008 at the UNC Health Sciences Library in the 5th Floor Conference Room (527). Please join us at 5:30pm for light refreshments followed by the lecture at 6pm. Meetings are free and open to the public.

Vanessa Northington Gamble, MD, PhD, will be presenting a lecture entitled, "Without Health and Long Life All Else Fails": A History of African-American Efforts to Eliminate Racial Disparities in Health and Health Care.

Dr. Gamble is University Professor of Medical Humanities at the George Washington University. She is the first woman and African American to hold this prestigious, endowed faculty position and is also member of the University’s Columbian College of Arts and Sciences faculty in the Department of History. Prior to her appointment to George Washington, Dr. Gamble was Director of the Tuskegee University National Center for Bioethics in Research and Health Care. Throughout her career Dr. Gamble has worked to promote equity and justice in American medicine and public health. A physician, scholar, and activist, she is an internationally recognized expert on the history of American medicine, racial and ethnic disparities in health and health care, cultural competence, and bioethics. She is the author of several widely acclaimed publications on the history of race and racism in American medicine, including the award-winning Making a Place for Ourselves: The Black Hospital Movement: 1920-1945. Public service has been a hallmark of Dr. Gamble’s career. She chaired the committee that took the lead role in the successful campaign to obtain an apology in 1997 from President Clinton for the infamous United States Public Health Syphilis Study at Tuskegee.

For directions to the UNC Health Sciences Library, visit the HSL website. The Robertson Scholars Express Bus travels non-stop between UNC (Morehead Planetarium) and Duke (Chapel Circle).

For more information on the Bullitt Club and a schedule of meetings for 2008-2009, please visit the Bullitt website. Bullitt lectures for 2008-9 are now available as mp3 downloads.