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Title details for Black Man in a White Coat by Damon Tweedy, M.D. - Available

Black Man in a White Coat

A Doctor's Reflections on Race and Medicine

by Damon Tweedy, M.D.
Corey Allen
Audiobook
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1 of 1 copy available
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
  • ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE'S TOP TEN NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE YEAR A LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST BOOK SELECTION
  • A BOOKLIST EDITORS' CHOICE BOOK SELECTION One doctor's passionate and profound memoir of his experience grappling with race, bias, and the unique health problems of black Americans When Damon Tweedy begins medical school, he envisions a bright future where his segregated, working-class background will become largely irrelevant. Instead, he finds that he has joined a new world where race is front and center. The recipient of a scholarship designed to increase black student enrollment, Tweedy soon meets a professor who bluntly questions whether he belongs in medical school, a moment that crystallizes the challenges he will face throughout his career. Making matters worse, in lecture after lecture the common refrain for numerous diseases resounds, "More common in blacks than in whites." Black Man in a White Coat examines the complex ways in which both black doctors and patients must navigate the difficult and often contradictory terrain of race and medicine. As Tweedy transforms from student to practicing physician, he discovers how often race influences his encounters with patients. Through their stories, he illustrates the complex social, cultural, and economic factors at the root of many health problems in the black community. These issues take ongreater meaning when Tweedy is himself diagnosed with a chronic disease far more common among black people. In this powerful, moving, and deeply empathic book, Tweedy explores the challenges confronting black doctors, and the disproportionate health burdens faced by black patients, ultimately seeking a way forward to better treatment and more compassionate care.

    • Creators

    • Publisher

    • Release date

      September 8, 2015

    • Formats

      • OverDrive Listen audiobook

        • ISBN: 9781490696577
        • File size: 251579 KB
        • Duration: 08:44:07

    • Languages

      • English

    • Reviews

      • AudioFile Magazine
        Damon Tweedy, a black physician and psychiatry professor, analyzes both the poorer health status of blacks in America and his own professional journey. Tweedy is a thoughtful, humble guy with working-class roots, and narrator Corey Allen adeptly portrays those qualities with his rich voice and excellent pacing. Tweedy went to Duke Medical School, one of a handful of black students among wealthy classmates with Ivy League backgrounds. His educational and medical experiences solidify his view that being black is bad for your health. A professor asks him to fix the lights in class; an elderly white patient refuses a black doctor; a woman with fibroid tumors has no insurance despite having both a husband and a job. Tweedy is full of infuriating stories but leaves room for hope, and Allen infuses that essential quality into his performance. A.B. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine
      • Publisher's Weekly

        July 27, 2015
        In this eye-opening memoir, Tweedy, a black psychiatrist who interned at Duke University Medical School in the mid-1990s, vigorously confronts his profession and its erratic treatment of African-American patients. Tweedy, raised in a segregated working-class neighborhood, gets a full scholarship to the white academic world of Duke, where he's challenged on every level, including by a professor who wrongly assumes he's a janitor. Though Duke, like many elite colleges, tried to recruit minority students, Tweedy notes that the constant subliminal and overt racism at the schoolâwhich former professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. termed "the Plantation"âcaused many non-white recruits to suffer self-doubt and anxiety. His painful anecdotes, both as an intern and physician, show the critical health crisis within the black community; his patients included a drug-addicted girl pregnant with a dead infant, an older woman suffering from high blood pressure and diabetes, a man struggling with mental illness, and a young woman who contracted AIDS from her boyfriend. Tweedy nicely unravels the essential issues of race, prejudice, class, mortality, treatment, and American medicine without blinking or polite excuses.

    Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

    subjects

    Languages

    • English

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