Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine -- Uché Blackstock, Hardcover

One of NPR's 11 Books to Look Forward to in 2024

"Legacy is both a compelling memoir and an edifying analysis of the inequities in the way we deliver healthcare in America. Uché Blackstock is a force of nature." --Abraham Verghese, MD, New York Times-bestselling author of The Covenant of Water and Cutting for Stone

The rousing, captivating story of a Black physician, her career in medicine, and the deep inequities that still exist in the U.S. healthcare system

Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, it never occurred to Uché Blackstock and her twin sister, Oni, that they would be anything but physicians. In the 1980s, their mother headed an organization of Black women physicians, and for years the girls watched these fiercely intelligent women in white coats tend to their patients and neighbors, host community health fairs, cure ills, and save lives.

What Dr. Uché Blackstock did not understand as a child--or learn about at Harvard Medical School, where she and her sister had followed in their mother's footsteps, making them the first Black mother-daughter legacies from the school--were the profound and long-standing systemic inequities that mean just 2 percent of all U.S. physicians today are Black women; the racist practices and policies that ensure Black Americans have far worse health outcomes than any other group in the country; and the flawed system that endangers the well-being of communities like theirs. As an ER physician, and later as a professor in academic medicine, Dr. Blackstock became profoundly aware of the systemic barriers that Black patients and physicians continue to face.

Legacy is a journey through the critical intersection of racism and healthcare. At once a searing indictment of our healthcare system, a generational family memoir, and a call to action, Legacy is Dr. Blackstock's odyssey from child to medical student to practicing physician--to finally seizing her own power as a health equity advocate against the backdrop of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement.

Author: Uché Blackstock
Publisher: Viking
Published: 01/23/2024
Pages: 304
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.88lbs
Size: 8.55h x 5.62w x 0.84d
ISBN: 9780593491287

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 10/23/2023
Kirkus Reviews 12/01/2023

About the Author
Dr. Uché Blackstock is a physician and thought leader on bias and racism in health care. She is the founder and CEO of Advancing Health Equity, appears regularly on MSNBC and NBC News, and is a former associate professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine and the former faculty director for recruitment, retention, and inclusion in the Office of Diversity Affairs at NYU School of Medicine. Dr. Blackstock received both her undergraduate and medical degrees from Harvard University, making her and her twin sister, Oni, the ­first Black mother-daughter legacies from Harvard Medical School. Dr. Blackstock currently lives in her hometown of Brooklyn, New York, with her two school-age children.