History of the Health Sciences Lecture with the Medical Center Hour

Featuring Professor Richard McKinley Mizelle Jr.

In-person registration is required as seating is limited.

Professor Richard Mizelle’s talk connects medical science, racial politics, and health activism to make comprehensible the many faces of diabetes. Diabetes is an evolving disease with twists, turns, and unknowns leading to notions of multiple origins and identities. Diabetes is different from other chronic diseases because of the ways in which measurements of control are often placed directly in the hands of sufferers.  Those with diabetes must manage the disease on an individual level, and managing this complicated illness contains elements of self-actualization, self-containment, and self-discipline, in addition to questions of medical access, surveillance, and power. The typology of diabetes evolved over the long twentieth century and has led many to advocate for a separate disease identity. Through it all, the othering of Black bodies and other groups have remained constant.

The work of historians is to reshape heterogeneous strains of dense statistics, ideas, anecdotes, and stories to make usable for scholars and the broader public. This talk makes intelligible the reasons so many dogged misconceptions about diabetes persist. An important step for seeking justice is making the incomprehensible and irrational visible for everyone to see, including highlighting for healthcare professionals, patients, and the public the process of exclusion that continues to impact the quality and nature of diabetes care today.  

Richard Mizelle is Associate Professor of History at the University of Houston and Co-Editor of the Environmental History’s Futures Series at the University of Oklahoma Press. His research, writing, and lecturing focuses on the history of race and healthcare politics, chronic disease, environmental health, and the historical connections between gender, identity, and ethnicity in medicine. Mizelle is the author of Backwater Blues: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the African American Imagination (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) and co-editor of Resilience and Opportunity: Lessons from the U.S. Gulf Coast after Katrina and Rita (Brookings Institution Press, 2011). His work has appeared in a wide range of academic journals and publications including The Lancet, ISIS, Journal of African American History, The New England Journal of Medicine, History Compass, Open Rivers Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, and the American Historian Magazine. His research has also been quoted in the Washington Post, ProPublica, Kaiser Health News, New York Times, New Yorker Magazine, and he has appeared and consulted on numerous local and national podcasts including NPR’s Throughline and Floodlines, an award-winning podcast on Hurricane Katrina produced by the Atlantic Magazine.

This lecture is sponsored by Historical Collections at the Claude Moore Health Sciences Library and The Center for Health Humanities and Ethics at the UVA School of Medicine.