The Origins of Health Disparities Research: W.E.B. DuBois’s Health and Physique of the Negro American (1906)

The Department of Epidemiology Seminar Series

Speaker:
Evelynn Hammonds, PhD
Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz Professor of the History of Science
Professor of African and African American Studies & Professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Abstract:

Between 1897 and 1906, the great African American scholar and activist, W.E.B. DuBois published a set of sociological studies that were desribed as employing  “…the first significant scientific approach to the health problems and biological study of the Negro.” This study is the first example of an attempt by an African American intellectual to use scientific and sociological methods to challenge scientific racism in medical and anthropological studies of African Americans. This talk will discuss DuBois’ work, which I characterize as the first attempt to apply modern methods to what is now called the field of health disparities.