Medicating Race by Anne Pollock

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MEDICATING RACE

This website stores data such as cookies to enable essential site EXPERIMENTAL FUTURES functionality, as well as marketing, personalization, and analytics. You Technological Lives, Scientiﬁc Arts, Anthropological Voices may change your settings at any time or accept the default settings. A series edited by Michael M. J. Fischer and Joseph Dumit Privacy Policy Marketing Personalization Analytics Save

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MEDICATING RACE Heart Disease and Durable Preoccupations with Di√erence

ANNE POLLOCK

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Duke University Press Durham and London 2012

∫ 2012

Duke University Press

All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ! Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan Typeset in Quadraat and Trade Gothic by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Catalogingin-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

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CONTENTS

Ackn Ac know owle ledgm dgmen ents ts vii vii In Intr trod oduc ucti tion on 1 1

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Racial Preoccupations and Earl Ea rlyy C Card ardio iolo logy gy 28

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Making Normal Populations and

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Making Di√erence in the Framingham and Jac Jackso kson n He Heart art Stu Studie diess 52 3

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The Durability of African American

Hyperte Hyp ertensi nsion on as a Disease Disease Ca Catego tegory ry 83 4

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The Slavery Hypothesis beyond Geneti Gen eticc Det Determ ermini inism sm 107

5

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Thiazide Diuretics at a Nexus of Associations: Racial Rac ialize ized, d, Pro Proven, ven, Ol Old, d, Chea Cheap p 131 6

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BiDil: Medicating the Intersection of Race Race and Hear Heartt F Fail ailure ure 155 Conc Co nclu lusi sion on 180 180 Notes 197

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Works orks C Cit ited ed 22 225 5 Index 253

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to the physicians and others who wh o let me tag along in the worlds of heart disease research and race, welcoming me to their conferences, sharing insights in countless conversations, and giving comments on written work in progress. Among the many to recognize and thank are Drs. Michelle Albert, Charles Curry, Janice Douglas, Keith Ferdinand, John Flack, Clarence Grim, Kenneth Jamerson, Shawna Nesbitt, Elijah Saunders, Neil Shulman, Herman Taylor, Sean Wharton, Richard Allen Williams, and Jackson Wright. Drs. Paul Sorlie at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, Frances Henderson at the Jackson Heart Study, and Daniel Levy at the Framingham Heart Study were gracious hosts to my questions there. This project began at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the guidance of Joe Dumit, David Jones, and Sherry Turkle, and I owe them a debt of gratitude. Joe Dumit has been a diligent mentor, kindred intellectual spirit, and academic inspiration. His scholarship has been deeply inﬂuential, and his generosity with his time both while at mit and beyond has ha s been extraordinary. David Jones’s arrival at mit was fortuitous for me both intellectually and logistically: he was a generous and exacting reader, and he organized crucial ﬁnancial support and intellectual community through the mit Center for the Study of Diversity in Science, Technology and Medicine, which was founded by Evelynn Hammonds with funding from the Mellon Foundation. Sherry Turkle has provided invaluable support for my scholarship by fostering intellectual community through her Initiative on Technology and Self, by engaging me in formative conversations about social theory, theory, and by having faith f aith in the importance of my story and point of view. She has both provided a superlative example of an incisively relevant intellectual voice and encouraged me to develop my own. Many other mit faculty also provided crucial early guidance. Elazer EdelThis website stores data such as gave cookies to enableman essential siteremarkably insightful lectures on cardiovascular pathophysiology; functionality, as well as marketing, Evelynn Hammonds introduced me to the topics of race and medicine at the personalization, and analytics. You oftime my graduate career; Kenneth Manning challenged me to write may change your beginning settings at any or accept the default settings. complicated stories that remain human stories; and Susan Silbey pushed me to Privacy Policy Marketing Personalization Analytics

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

present those stories more clearly. Evelyn Fox Keller, Hugh Gusterson, and Abha Sur helped me both hone my sts analysis and learn how to combine scholarship and activism. Other activist faculty were also both cherished allies and role models, including Noam Chomsky Chomsky,, Nancy Kanwisher, Jonathan King, and Nergis Mavalvala. I have been fortunate to ﬁnd excellent homes for developing this work and new projects since, ﬁrst as a visitor at Rice University in the Department of Anthropology, and then as assistant professor of science, technology and culture at Georgia Tech in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture. I have found rich interdisciplinary academic community at each of these institutions and beyond. My intellectual inquiry has been incomparably enriched by on-topic and o√-topic conversations with colleagues including Amy Agigian, Robert Aronowitz, Wenda Bauchspies, Katherine Behar, Ian Bogost, Nichole Payne Carelock, Carol Colatrella, Carl DiSalvo, Elizabeth Freudenthal, Nate Greenslit, Narin Hassan, Anthony Hatch, Chihyung Chihyun g Jeon, Wen Hua Kuo, Hannah Landecker, Aryn Martin, Mara Mills, Janet Murray Murray,, Natasha Myers, Alondr Alondraa Nelson, Gerald Oppenheimer, Esra Ozkan, Rachel Prentice, Kane Race, Michael Rossi, Aslihan Sanal, Janet Shim, Jenny Smith, Kaushik Sunder Rajan, Will Taggart, and Livia Wick. I owe a special debt to Ruha Benjamin, Nihad Farooq, Sara Giordano, Jeremy Greene, Jennifer Hamilton, John Krige, Melissa Littleﬁeld, Robert Rosenberger, Miriam Shakow, Kate Weiner, and especially Candis Callison and Lindsay Smith, treasured colleagues who read and commented on draft chapters in various iterations. I have also had the privilege of presenting material from this project and receiving invaluable comments from audiences, including at several Society for Social Studies of Science conferences; Vital Politics ii and later a bios Roundtable at the London School of Economics; the Biopolitics of Science Seminar Series at Sydney University; the Centre for the Study of Innovation as Social Process at Goldsmiths College; the Institute for Science and Society Seminar Series at the University of Nottingham; the Science in Human Culture Lecture Series at Northwestern University; and the Science and Technology Studies Colloquium at the University of California, Davis. Some of the material that straddles chapters 4 and 5 has been published in the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics Ethics (in 2008). Some of the material that stradTransnational ional This website storesdles datachapters such as 5 and 6 was published in the volume The Value of Transnat cookies to enable essential site Medical Research (2012). functionality, as well as marketing, I am grateful to Ken Wissoker and Duke University Press for having faith in personalization, and analytics. You may change your settings at any time this project and shepherding the manuscript through revisions and into pubor accept the default settings. Privacy Policy Marketing Personalization Analytics

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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lication, and to Mark Mastromarino, Liz Smith, Jade Jad e Brooks, Maura High, and Amy Ruth Buchanan for their help through that process. The insightful reader reports from Steven Epstein, Alondra Nelson, and an anonymous reviewer helped me to sharpen the manuscript immensely. Most of all I thank Maital Dar, whose editing acuity is a treasure and without whose love, support, and sense of humor all life’s projects would be less worthwhile.

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INTRODUCTION

In 2005, BiDil became the ﬁrst drug ever approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (fda) for use in a speciﬁc race: it was indicated for heart failure in ‘‘self-identiﬁed black patients.’’ As such, it became fodder for both popular and academic debate about the role of race in medicine, and the nature of racial di√erence more broadly. As novel as its fda indication was, this drug represents just one moment in a long-standing and dynamic interplay of race, pharmaceuticals, and heart disease in America. Medicating Race examines these. In the wake of BiDil’s commercial failure, this analytical contextualization helps to account for its allure and its unpalatability, as well as to open larger questions of medicine and American identities. My analysis of race in medicine focuses on heart disease categories and their treatment. It highlights the complicated roles that physicians have long taken, advocating for the urgent needs of black patients on both scientiﬁc and social justice grounds. Whereas most scholars have situated BiDil within discussions of race and genetics and pharmaceutical marketing, I see the drug as part of narratives that precede and exceed any of these things. Enlarging the framework to pay attention to the intertwined trajectories of medical research and advocacy situates BiDil within a wider set of medical and racial ideas and practices. The intersecting and mutually constituting trajectories of race, heart disease, and pharmaceuticals provide an excellent site to analyze what I conceptualize as the durability of preoccupations with race in medicine. Race in heart disease research and practice is durable: it cannot easily be gotten rid of. It is also a preoccupation: it cannot easily be let go. Durable preoccupation thus o√ers a dual concept with intrinsic tensions. Race in medicine provokes appeal and aversion, disassociation and solidarity, displacement and investment. In tracking the continuities and discontinuities of racialized heart disease discourses since thedata founding This website stores such as of American cardiology, we can see that the promise and danger cookies to enableheralded essential site around BiDil tap into something deeper. Arguments over how to functionality, as well as marketing, personalization, and analytics. You may change your settings at any time or accept the default settings.

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medicate race reveal fundamental tensions in democratic and unequal American medicine and society. Close attention to this particular story has implications for global scholarly and activist conversations about pharmaceuticals, race, and justice.

My argument is threefold: 1. Heart disease has been enrolled in articulating Americanness Americanness,, and so racial preoccupations were present at the founding of American heart disease research and have both both endured and transformed since then. Since its inception as a ﬁeld, heart disease research has been grappling with the dangers of the ‘‘mo ‘‘modern dern American way of life,’ life,’’’ access to which has been foundationally and fundamentally organized in terms of race. Also at stake has been access to cutting-edge medicine for both patients and practitioners. Articulations of inclusion and di√erence in cardiovascular research and pharmaceutical practices have been part of articulating democratic and racialized American ways of life. 2. The durability of racialized disease categories—and the appeal of racialized drugs— does not rest on genetic determinism. The appeal of race in medicine does not reduce to the appeal of genetics. Considerable epistemological eclecticism underlies notions of heart disease d isease etiology, etiology, of wh which ich genetics is just one player. There are many ways to represent medically relevant racial di√erence besides genetics, and more important, medical practice is generally oriented around intervention. In order to give an accurate account of the role of race in medical research and practice and to gain new traction for critique, we need to move beyond situating genetics at the center and pay attention to how medicine not only arbitrates but also intervenes on di√erence. 3. Medical treatment should be seen as a site of—rather than an alternative to—social and political contestation. To understand mobilizations against health disparities, d isparities, we should not assume that any particular action undertaken will fall cleanly into categories of biological or social, clinical or political. Paying attention to the complex and plural projects of clinician-researchers working in the area of race and medicine prevents any simple division between scientiﬁc reiﬁcation, medical intervention, and social action. To understand the role of pharmaceuticals at this site, the context of market-oriented medicine should be a starting point for analysis rather than its end. This website stores data such as cookies to enable essential site functionality, as well as marketing, personalization, and analytics. You may change your settings at any time or accept the default settings.

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To lay out the book’s argument more fully, I will attend to some of the key terms and topics, and describe the overall approach of the book in order to situate it within my scholarly ﬁeld of science and technology studies ( sts) and beyond. First, I will deﬁne and describe the processes that I am terming ‘‘medicating race,’’ highlighting the speciﬁcities of medicine as a ﬁeld of research and its particular value as a site for inquiry into race. Next, I describe the overarching approach, which is to track durable preoccupations pr eoccupations with di√erence. I will then address the value and importance of the three constituent elements of my narrative: heart disease, pharmaceuticals, phar maceuticals, and black-white di√erence. Finally, I provide an overview of the chapters of the book.

Medicating Race This book draws from critique of race and science, but it more speciﬁcally grapples with the distinct status of medicine as a ﬁeld. Medicine is ‘‘not a coherent whole,’’ but ‘‘rather, ‘‘rather, an amalgam of thoughts, a mixture of hab habits, its, an assemblage of techniques.’’ tech niques.’’∞ A central heterogeneity in medicine that interests me is medicine’s duality as both a science and a practice—one that does not merely reify di√erence but also seeks to act on it. Philosophers of science have drawn our attention to the productivity of ‘‘representing and intervening’’ in knowledge-making,≤ and this tension is fundamental to medical knowledge. Medicine both represents and intervenes on racialized bodies. There is a rich polysemy in the word ‘‘medicating’’ that I am interested in mining for its theoretical insights. Attending to the immanence of medicating and mediating,≥ I argue that medicine is a ﬁeld that mediates race, in the sense of arbitrating as well as intervening. Medical experts, disease categories, and pharmaceuticals all participate in medicating and mediating race. The word ‘‘medicating’’ is in the present progressive tense because neither medicine nor its relationship with race is a settled thing granted by history or science. Medicine and race are emergent processes in motion in multiple spheres. Clinical medicine, like natural science that is the subject of much critical scholarship of race, r ace, cannot settle the debates about race at the nexus of the biological and the social. Race’s relationship with medical practice remains messy both because medical data and e≈cacy are complicated notions that are hard to pin down and because clinical medicine is not independent

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from other biological and social discourses. This makes medicine a rich site for an sts analysis that seeks to abandon a priori distinctions between natural and social events, as Michel Callon has canonically argued. ∂ To draw on Sheila Jasano√ ’s rich idiom, medicin medicinee is a site at which natural and social orders are co-produced.∑ When bodies and technologies come together in medicine, neither precedes the other. In medicating practices, both social and natural orders order s have the capacity to be bolstered and/or transformed. This book considers ‘‘medicating’’ in a broad sense, as a verb that refers to actions taken in and about medicine as a ﬁeld of social relations. ‘‘‘Medicating’’ ‘Medicating’’ importantly includes the most obvious meaning of the word, the administration of medicines, but it also encompasses much more. In addition to the prescription of drugs, ‘‘medicating’ ‘‘medicating’’’ refers to other linked actions that medical practitioners engage in, including setting parameters around diagnostic categories, administering a range of diagnostic tests and treatments, conducting longitudinal studies, and writing clinical guidelines. The concept of medicating is informed by, and in dialogue with, literatures of medicalization, but its emphasis on the emergent quality of medicine’s relationship with social categories is central. Whereas medicalization can imply that there is some space essentially exterior to medicine that is being colonized and removed from other social spheres, such as morality or politics,∏ medicating race need not posit that a boundary bound ary is being crossed between the appropria ppropriately and inappropriately medical. The relationship between medicating race and, for example, politicizing race can be combinatorial rather than opposed. Medicating is not an alternative to a social movement, or an example of a nefarious political agenda, but a way to understand the process and progress of agendas and movements that are simultaneously moral and political, commercial and professional, and which play a role in how things came to be understood as racial and medical. I do not presuppose that medicating is an inherently less moral way of addressing problems than other ways, as is commonly suggested in medicalization literature and in the medical anthropology that draws on it,π and in discussions of race and pharmaceuticals. The moral and the political are at stake in medicating as much as they are at stake in any other bio/social bio/ social sphere. This becomes a particularly pressing issue in what Adele Clarke and her colleagues have termed the ‘‘biomedicalization era,’’ in which ‘‘the focus is no longer on illness, disability, and disease as matters of fate, but on health as a matter of ongoing moral self-transformation.’’∫ In this biopolitics, as the sociThis website stores data such as cookies to enable essential site functionality, as well as marketing, personalization, and analytics. You may change your settings at any time or accept the default settings.

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ologist David Skinner has argued, confronting racism is not about the denial of biology but a struggle strug gle over it.’’Ω Medicating race is not an alternative to taking moral and political action, but a high-stakes component of it. Indeed, medicating is an excellent analytical framework for the sts critique of race because medicine intervenes on the boundaries between social and biological, material and semiotic. Race is at stake at precisely these boundaries. Thus, analysis of this intersection contributes to theories of race as well as to the history and social studies of medicine. Racial di√erence in heart disease is material: the premature mortality of African Americans as a group compared with white Americans as a group, which the leading black cardiologist Richard Allen Williams has called ‘‘the death gap,’’∞≠ takes place in actual bodies in the world and, no matter what caveats we make about the trickiness of data and etiology, the terrain is necessarily in part about biology. Yet racial di√erence in heart disease is also semiotic: the data cannot be extricated from lenses of di√erence-oriented preoccupations, and arguments about race and disease become ways to articulate di√erence in other aspects of society and individual identity. Social movements can seek to intervene on both symbolic and embodied registers—as Alondra Nelson has shown in her work on the health activism of the Black Panther Party, Party, social movements can recontextualize medical ideas in diverse ways as they mobilize for health care and against medical harms, as part of a larger vision of racial justice.∞∞ I argue that in order to understand the productivity of race in medicine, race needs to be understood as a category that is always a subject of the dual aspects of medicine’s mediation—bioscientiﬁc arbitration and pragmatic intervention. Race in biomedicine does not originate in the science and ﬁlter down to the doctors’ o≈ces; neither does it simply ﬁlter up. It does slightly di√erent work in each sphere, but gains its durability through its capacity to travel between them. The task t ask for critical scholars should n not ot be to seek out a true or innocent science, attempting to purge the material-semiotic category of race from biology, but to track plural noninnocent discourses at the nexus of the biological and the social. Critique that rests only on scientiﬁc reiﬁcation without attending to clinical intervention is both a failure to engage and contributes to the durability of the categories that it ostensibly critiques. Explaining racial disparities in heart disease through appeals to other social or biological phenomena does not free us from the task of addressing race, because it is precisely the relevance of race across heterogeneous ways of categorizing bodies in the context of social inequality that makes it particularly durable. DisThis website stores data such as cookies to enable essential site functionality, as well as marketing, personalization, and analytics. You may change your settings at any time or accept the default settings.

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placing race onto some supposedly more rigorously deﬁned mode of account-

ing for di√erence—whether socioeconomic class, genetics, or something else —contributes to, rather than diminishes, the durability of race. Medicating processes can become what the sociologists of race Michael Omi and Howard Winant have termed racial projects: ‘‘ A A racial project is simultasimultaneously an interpretation, representation, representation, or explanation of racial dynamics, and an e√ e√ort ort to reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines.’’∞≤ To grapple with the accounts of those mobilized around race, pharmaceuticals, and heart disease, both the interpretive and the redistributive aspects matter. Interpretations, representations, and explanations for racial disparities in heart disease are mobilized in diverse ways, inseparable from demands for changing the distribution of resources such as pharmaceuticals and funding for longitudinal research and clinical trials. Racial projects organized around disease categories and pharmaceuticals can take diverse forms, and pointing out that the discourse is racial is the start of the analysis rather than its end. Race is a dynamic and robust discourse that does not belong to those with a stake in perpetuating present inequalities alone, but rather to the terrain of the debate.∞≥ For example, pharmaceutical companies or disparities advocates can argue for or against any particular mechanism that o√ers hope (or provokes alarm), such as full integration of African Americans into mainstream American medicine’s high levels of medication, or race-speciﬁc drugs. But we can tell that the discourse is a racial discourse, because no party in the conversation can talk about disease categories like coronary disease or hypertension, or drugs like thiazides or BiDil, without at least implicitly talking about race. At the same time that medicine mediates race, it also mediates citizenship, and these processes are central to the constitution of biological citizenship in the United States. Whereas biological citizenship literature has generally focused either on rich countries in general or on particular resource-poor ones, this book attends to the distinctly American context. Some of the biological citizenship practices in the United States are like those in resource-poor settings. What Adriana Petryna has characterized in the Ukraine as ‘‘a massive demand for but selective access to a form of social welfare based on medical, scientiﬁc, and legal criteria that both acknowledge biological injury and compensate for it’’∞∂ applies to demands for black hospitals in the early part of my account and to the demands for access to pharmaceuticals in the later part. These coexist with biosocial aspirations that Nikolas Rose and his colleagues have argued are distinctive of those in contemporary liberal democracies. ∞∑ This website stores data such as cookies to enable essential site functionality, as well as marketing, personalization, and analytics. You may change your settings at any time or accept the default settings.

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Rose is right that contemporary biological citizenship as it emerges in directto-consumer genetic genealogy testing need not be seen as part of a trajectory

with eugenics, and I am deeply sympathetic with the open-endedness of Rose’s sensibility. However, if we are to grapple with biological citizenship in the United States, both our famously consumerist medicine and our infamously unequal access to it are fundamental. The diverse forms of biological citizenship overlap and coexist. As the legal leg al scholar Dorothy Roberts has argued, race ∞∏

is as fundamental fundament al to the new biocitizen as it was to the old. Paying attention to a broader historical terrain can give some texture to the continuities and discontinuities of how medicine has mediated race and citizenship in America. The concept of medicating in this book encompasses, in addition to the processes of administering medicine and mediating biological and social orders, a valence of meditating. When doctors and others argue about how to medicate race, one thing that they are doing is meditating upon race, articulating emergent theories of the di√erentiated world through languages of medical terminology and data. In an elaboration of what the medical sociologist Stefan Timmermans has called a ‘‘second-order scientist,’’∞π my project involves second-order meditating: meditating upon the meditations of historical actors to theorize race and medicine. My methods for tracking these meditations were diverse. The earlier, historical chapters rely mostly on published materials from the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century, as well as archival sources.∞∫ My understanding of these materials was enhanced by conversations with current and former researchers at the Framingham and Jackson heart studies. The later chapters draw from my main research process. I attended several conferences at which the intersection of race and heart disease was central, especially of the International Society for Hypertension in Blacks (ishib), and also the National Medical Association (nma) and the Association of Black Cardiologists (abc).∞Ω In addition to inter views with some of the key ﬁgures, my analysis was deeply informed by listening to conversations in progress. I found myself most interested in statements directed not at me as an individual, but between physicians—both from the podium to an audience and at less formal sites such as conference meal tables. I learned from the ways that the physicians were meditating upon race both in the sessions themselves, where the presentations on these topics were explicit, and in the in-between times. Approaching the ﬁeld in this way, rather than principally through archival or oral history approaches, made some of the mundane practices visible. In a sense, this approach is an extension of what Warwick Anderson has highlighted as the need to explore ‘‘how ideas of race This website stores data such as cookies to enable essential site functionality, as well as marketing, personalization, and analytics. You may change your settings at any time or accept the default settings.

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Accept All in the mundane practices of medical education,’’≤≠ grappling with are deployed their role in continuing medical education. I did not get the chance to see how

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these doctors interacted with their patients, but I was able hear how they described their relationships with patients as they interacted with each other. Many were also very generous with me, explaining their ﬁeld with enthusiasm and encouragement in ongoing conversations at, between, and outside these sites. I also paid attention to invocations of race and pharmaceuticals that were happening outside medical contexts, enrolling these as sites of meditation upon intersections of race, pharmaceuticals, and heart disease. These range from a Coca-Cola Black History Month advertising campaign, to an episode of Oprah, to a cartoon by the incisive cartoonist Keith Knight. Attending to these kinds of sources is important because it picks up the broader salience of these issues of race in medicine. Including them is part of a co-productionist program for sts research that, as Sheila Jasano√ observes, ‘‘shifts our attention from fact --making making (the traditional preserve of much work in science studies) to sense-making as a topic of overarching interest, with scientiﬁc sense-making as a particular, if highly signiﬁcant, sub subcategory category.’’ .’’≤∞ Later in the project, I also became directly involved in organizing sites for these meditations on and at the intersections of race, pharmaceuticals, and heart disease. As a doctoral fellow of the mit Center for the Study of Diversity in Science, Technology and Medicine, I was part of the organizing committee for conferences that emerged in the context of the hype and outrage about BiDil.≤≤ These conferences were sites of highly charged contestations among scholars from across the disciplines of history, social sciences, medicine, genetics, American studies, African American studies, and law, as well as pharmaceutical representatives and civil rights advocates. Exchanges that took place at these conferences became key sites for my own analytic engagement with the ﬁeld.

Trackingg Durable Preoccupations with Di√erence Trackin In all of these mediations of and meditations on race and heart disease, I was struck by the durability of race. Durability is a concept that I use to capture the resilience of race in the face of critique. Compelling critiques of the use of race as a central organizing category from across the ideological spectrum—from conservative pundits who imagine a meritocracy that can be evacuated of its historical and current exclusions according to race, to the radical treatise

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Against Race by the social theorist Paul Gilroy, which argues for a ‘‘planetary Accept All

humanism’’—have not weakened its appeal. Something is durable if it resists wear or decay decay,, if it is resilient in the face of stress, age, attack, or changing

circumstances. The very ﬂexibility of race helps to make it highly resistant to destruction (yet amenable to deconstruction). Race is always changing and yet lasting and enduring, something that cannot be easily gotten rid of. This durability is the source of great frustration for many critics of race in medicine, who often operate as if race rises or ffalls alls on its scientiﬁc validity. To grapple with the durability of race, it is essential to pay attention to it as simultaneously a central locus of power in the social world, and a site of discourse. Recent historiography of race has highlighted productive tensions within racial discourse, in which race is ﬁgured as both ﬁxed and mutable, deﬁnite and unknowable. un knowable. As Ann Laura Stoler has pointed out, ‘‘ ‘‘Ambiguity Ambiguity of those sets of relationships between the somatic and the inner self, the phenotype and the genotype, pigment shade and psychological sensibility are not slips in, or obstacles to, racial thinking but rather conditions for its proliferation and possibility.’’≤≥ Contradictions within notions of race contribute to rather than inhibit its durability. On this point, Waltraud Ernst argues that idiosyncratic and contradictory discourses about race do not weaken them but rather are part of what makes them ‘‘work’’: ‘‘Racial discourses work well not despite their logical inconsistencies, ambiguities and mixing up of premises but because of them. They are destructively all-pervasive precisely because they are overdetermined and multivariant, creating the possibility for di√erent arguments or perspectives (moral, biological, cultural, etc.) to be accentuated within di√erent contexts and depending on the aims pursued.’’ pursued.’’≤∂ The ambiguities and plural registers, then, are generative. And so it should be no surprise that discourses of connections between racialized bodies and disease are not always coherent, or that pieces of them are sometimes mobilized in unpredictable ways. Racial discourses also change over time. Because race remains so important across history, this can foster the illusion that race is outside history, but as Barbara Fields F ields points out, race is a ‘‘historical product,’’ not a ‘‘transhistorical’’ or ‘‘metaphysical’’ entity.≤∑ Moreover, even within any particular historical period, as the historians of race and science Evelynn Hammonds and Rebecca Herzig have argued, ‘‘even when race is the object of explicit study, its deﬁnition is rarely plain or stable.’’ ≤∏ That is why attending to how race becomes durable in each era is so important. That race emerges out of a historical context is simple enough to assert;

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how it does so is far more interesting. In tracking the continuities and discontinuities AcceptinAllracial discourses around one disease, my project complements recent scholarship in the history of race and medicine, including Jonathan ≤π

Metzl s account of how schizophrenia became a black disease, and, espe cially, Keith Wailoo’s account of how cancer ‘‘crossed the color line.’’ Wailoo argues that ‘‘the story of cancer and the color line therefore becomes the story of cancer’s transformation and racialization—by which I mean, the processes by which scientists used the disease to create narratives of di√erence.’’ ≤∫ Like Wailoo’s account of cancer over much the same period, my account of heart disease provides an opportunity to see how some ideas about the relationship between race and disease are rejected, some are inverted, and others stand the test of time. This repetitive rearticulation of race in heart disease constitutes its durability. The durability of race in medicine does not come from any one source. Acknowledging the epistemological eclecticism that underlies race helps us to see why various debates over the etiology of racialized heart disease have not undermined racial reiﬁcation itself. When debates over the past century have focused on whether the category at hand—syphilitic heart disease in the early twentieth century, or hypertension since the postwar period, or heart failure since the emergence of BiDil—is due to inborn characteristics or to social experiences, they have not disrupted the reiﬁcation of racialized black heart disease itself. This is where my account diverges diverge s from most critical race studies and science and technology studies accounts of BiDil. Whereas many scholars argue that deciding whether the cause of disparities is biological di√erence or social inequality determines who is responsible for what should be done about a bout it,≤Ω I do not think that race in the world operates on this kind of logic. Diverse actors can accommodate considerable epistemological eclecticism underlying what is recorded as status as African American, and that ambiguity is not a slip in racial discourses but part of what makes their proliferation possible. Ambiguity does not impede diverse medical and social response but facilitates it. The approaches of science and technology studies have provided productive means to analyze the emergence of new scientiﬁc facts and technologies, and the concept of durability can bring an sts approach to bear on what might seem to be an old-fashioned old-f ashioned topic such as race in medicine. med icine. In his essay ‘‘Tech‘‘Technology Is Society Made Durable,’’ Bruno Latour does not use ‘‘durability’’ as a technical term: his principal concern is actually with stabilization. Latour wants us to recognize that both human relations and mechanisms contribute to the relative stability of a particular assemblage, and that the dominance of

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particular humans or mechanisms is the result of the stabilization, st abilization, rather than the cause of it. Despite Latour’s own aversion to paying attention to any categoAccept All ries that exceed the network being analyzed—and he is particularly resistant to including race, class, and gender in any account—we might fruitfully apply

this approach to the analysis of race and an d medicine. Insofar as claims about race and heart disease achieve stability, they do so in relationship with networks of physicians and researchers, which overlap with networks of activists and state actors, as well as particular pharmacopeias and conﬁgurations of bodies in the world. Racialized medicine achieves its durability not from the power of racist ideology on the one hand or mechanistic understandings of bodies on the other, but because many people—in government, in social activism, in medicine, and beyond—have coalesced around it as a way to articulate their visions of what to do. These multiple imbrications are precisely why the durability of race need not be a source of hopelessness in a world of injustice. Durability is also ﬂexibility. Recorded di√erence can be employed both to tell stories about existing inequality and to make demands for medical intervention and social change. Since the force of racial discourse becomes realized not in notions of ﬁxity alone but in combustible combinations of ﬁxity and ﬂuidity, to understand the terrain of racialized pharmaceuticals and racialized medicine as a whole, we should attend to the ways that these debates render race both stable and malleable, both naturalize it and mobilize it. A conception of race as simultaneously resilient and changing is a better terrain for critique than one that merely decries its resilience, because it opens up possibilities for critical scholars to be part of articulating change. Understanding durability in terms of a famous sts concept that Latour and others explore—the black box—can also be productive.≥≠ When race is operationalized as a variable—whether variable— whether in the statistical reports of the early twentieth century, or more systematically in longitudinal health research, or in disease categories and prescription practices—it necessarily becomes for a ﬂeeting moment what Latour would call a black box. In the Food and Drug Administration’s indication of BiDil for f or heart failure in ‘‘self-identiﬁed black patients,’ patients,’’’ all of the heterogeneous aspects that led to racially disparate heart failure are black-boxed. The prescribing physician may believe that black heart failure is caused by genetics, or by a high-salt diet, or by psychosocial stress, or by inadequate treatment of hypertension, but etiology can be black-boxed and the diagnosis itself used for action. That so few physicians do prescribe BiDil shows that the statements of the fda or the pharmaceutical company do not

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INTRODUCTION

have the power to dominate on their own. And yet, racialized disease categories are importantly di√erent from the types of claims that Latour tracks, such as ‘‘the structure of dna is a double-helix.’’≥∞ Racialized disease categories— Accept All from ‘‘diseases of modernity’’ at the beginning of the twentieth century to ‘‘heart failure in self-identiﬁed black patients’’ at the beginning of the twenty-

ﬁrst—never become fully stabilized. The black box keeps on being reopened, sometimes even by the same people who use it as a step stool. Durability is not an inevitable state of a√airs, and it must be constantly propped up and sustained. One thing that can feed durability is preoccupation. Together with physical objects in the world (such as pharmaceuticals and bodies), and facts (such as the results of clinical trials), preoccupation can prop up durability. Durable preoccupations are where fact and a√ect come together, and are particularly important for understanding medicating as a site of accounting for and protesting inequality in society. The concept of preoccupation o√ers a way to consider not merely the facts of a disease, but how the mind becomes engrossed, how the attention and the intellect can be commanded in debates over disease categories and identities in a way that is viscerally charged. Preoccupations are a√ective: they require us to grapple with how ‘‘activities of the body and mind are simultaneously engaged,’’ and ‘‘reason and passion, intelligence and feeling are employed together.’’≥≤ A√ect refers to ‘‘bodily ‘‘bodily capacities to a√ect and be a√ected,’’ and yet it is not presocial, because, as Patricia Clough evocatively argues, ‘‘there is a reﬂux back from conscious experience to a√ect.’’ ≥≥ Since both cardiovascular events and pharmaceuticals to reduce cardiovascular risk can induce sensations of ‘‘reﬂux’’ in a physiological sense, preoccupations with heart disease are a rich site at which to consider Clough’s proposition that a√ect is not only in human bodies and consciousness, but also in technologies. Much of this book addresses the ideas of physicians for whom engagement in these practices is part of their daily work, and so preoccupation is also connected with occupation, both as a term for a profession and as a way to label the tasks that ﬁll the day. The emergence of cardiology as an occupation and heart disease as a preoccupation have always been intertwined. At the intersection of a disease category and a social identity, we have the opportunity to think through both the material and the semiotic aspects of our lived experiences. Ideas become our preoccupations when they engross our attention, to the exclusion of other ideas and in a way that is viscerally charged. This visceral charge, more than the metaphoric language per se, is what Susan Sontag’s classic Illness as Metaphor most valuably alerted us to.

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For example, as I have argued elsewhere, breast cancer gives American women at the turn of the twenty-ﬁrst century an opportunity to talk about how Analytics many children we’ve had, or haven’t had, our sexuality, our beauty, our ethSave Accept All nicity, our mothers, our toxic environments, and more. ≥∂ Breast cancer is not somehow naturally or inevitably available for f or narration in this way, but came to Personalization

be so in the wake of feminism’s second wave. ≥∑ Many women have followed the lead of such public ﬁgures as Audre Lorde in telling stories of their bodies and their lives through this disease. ≥∏ Yet preoccupation is not a matter of direct personal experience, which is neither necessary (as the appeal of breast cancer activism for those without breast cancer has shown)≥π nor su≈cient (not every disease experience will become narrated as central to a life story). Indeed, as the sociologist Kate Weiner argues, heart disease may be less conducive to identity practices in part because of its perceived ordinariness and ubiquity.≥∫ This book attends to the ways that stories of identity and di√erence have been told through heart health and heart disease. A key aspect of preoccupations is that they precede any particular piece of data. Data do not determine preoccupations, and mere prevalence does not make a disease relevant for politicization or for cultural or identity practices. Rare diseases, such as bird ﬂu, often attract considerably more viscerally charged energy than common, and deadly, ones such as pneumonia. In fact, preoccupations precede data. For example, a long-standing preoccupation surrounds masculinity and heart disease, and so its toll on women is consistently framed as new or surprising, regardless of the data. In the insistence that ‘‘women get heart disease, too,’’ it is worthwhile to linger on the ‘‘too.’’ It points to preoccupation with the implicit masculinity of the category category,, and articulates the preoccupation even as it contests it. There is a generative tension in the framing of the leading cause of death as an exception. In the insistence of such actors ac tors as the founder of the Association of Black Cardiologists that ‘‘African Americans get coronary heart disease, too,’’ it is similarly worth lingering on the ‘‘too.’’ It points to preoccupation with the implicit whiteness of the category, and articulates the preoccupation even as it contests it. Throughout the period I describe here, racial preoccupations are both articulated and contested in diverse ways—in physicians refusing in the early twentieth century to recognize the African A frican American cardiovascular disease in front of them, in longitudinal investigators both claiming and disavowing representation of a larger body politic, in arguments over disease categories and drugs that are variously understood as genetic or social, cheap, or cutting-edge.

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One question that is central to this book is how di√erence comes to make a Personalization di√erence. Two aspects of racial di√erence are pertinent: that racial di√erence Analytics is amenable to durability because it is recordable; and that preoccupations with racial di√erence cannot be understood as separate from lived experiences of Save Accept All racial inequality inequality.. Categories of di√erence need not be measurable to be operationalized in

medicine, and many di√erences that are central to medical practice are recorded rather than measured, such as age, gender, family history, and more. The durability of racial di√erence di√eren ce draws on its recordability— not its measurability or elusive lack thereof. Attending to ways that di√erence is recordable, as opposed to measurable, is also a way to grapple with another dual aspect of di√erence: di√erence suggests diversity, but codifying di√erence according to discrete characteristics narrows the scope of the deﬁnition of diversity diversity.. That is, di√erence is about othering, but the othering is not so total as to exclude some common ground on which degrees of di√erence between things can be judged. I am attentive to what the parameters of di√erence are imagined to be. Throughout the century of research that I discuss, there has been a tension in the idea of inclusion: whether African Americans should be included because they are part of an American public, or because they are distinct. One meaning of di√erence is distinguishing characteristic, and various types of heart disease have been held up as corresponding to various types of Americans. The construction of those distinctions has increasingly drawn dr awn on statistics from longitudinal research and clinical trials. By attending to some of the same issues that Steven Epstein, a sociologist and science and technology studies scholar, characterizes as the ‘‘inclusion and di√erence paradigm,’’≥Ω I track ways in which participation in medical knowledge and pharmaceutical practice have become part of articulating inclusion and di√erence in American ways of life. These articulations emerge in the context of a society that is at once unequal and democratic. The historical trajectory of constructing and contesting di√erence in the United States is distinctly rooted b both oth in slavery, and in its abolition —in both the perpetuation of white supremacy, and its contestation. When di√erence occurs in the context of inequality, di√erence becomes disparity. This book is in dialogue with the interdisciplinary literatures of disparities, including those of historians, health professionals, civil rights activists, and policy makers. The medical historian David Jones, writing about American Indian epidemics, has pointed out that the meaning of disparities is not transparent: ‘‘Disparities can be seen as proof of natural hierarchy, as products of misbehavior, or as evidence of social injustice.’’ ∂≠ There has been

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tension in critiques of racialized medicine between the tendency to emphasize the severity of racial disparities to call for justice and the tendency to try to Personalization remove race by drawing on other factors to explain the disparities in a less Analytics socially loaded way way.. Di√erences Save Accept All provide fodder for preoccupations when they correspond with situations of dominance. As the feminist legal theorist Catharine MacKinnon Marketing

has pointed out, any observations of di√erence are not separable from conditions of dominance.∂∞ Attention to the relationship between di√erence and dominance one early to seein why, example, though whites was helps recorded thefor Framingham Heart ethnic Study Study,,di√erence it came toamong be no longer so. Preoccupations with racial di√erence in medicine—especially black compared with white—have remained durable not because of the compelling statistics about di√erence but because of the continued social reality of conditions of unequal access to power. This is why this recordable di√erence becomes not only an opportunity for taxonomy but also a mandate for advocating action against present inequalities. In order to track durable preoccupations with di√erence in medicine, I have chosen to organize my analysis around a series of intersections of three elements: heart disease, pharmaceuticals, and black-white di√erence. This is a choice among many potential paths of inquiry. I will now explore each of the three elements to highlight how they have distinct value, in their own right, and in combination.

Why Heart Disease? As historians and sociologists of heart disease have argued, the category of heart disease is itself multiple and elusive, exceeding objective and subjective grasp.∂≤ And yet heart disease is an apt venue for critical studies of medicine because it o√ers an opportunity to critique medicine not at its fringes but at its core. Critical race feminists have drawn attention to the th e ways that reproductive ∂≥

medicine participates in and perpetuates racial discourse, and this kind of analysis should also be applied to the traditionally masculine category of heart disease. For all of its demographic and medical research import, heart disease has been generally understudied by sts and critical studies of medicine more broadly. In the long-standing productive interest in genetic topics, and the current ﬂourishing of neuroscientiﬁc ones,∂∂ there has been relatively little interest in heart disease as a ﬁeld, but there should be. The literature attending to identity practices around heart disease is small relative to that investigating

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reproductive, psychiatric, and genetic disease, but it is rich—especially attend∂∑ Marketing ing to gender, and also to race and class. Part of my project is to interrogate how heart disease articulates individual and social bodies in ways that are both Personalization Analytics like and distinct from other disease categories. Like all disease, heart disease has been the subject of existential debates, Save Accept All that is, the extent to which it actually exists. For example, there has been bee n debate about whether risk factors such as hypertension should properly be considered

diseases and/ or be so widely treated with pharmaceuticals. In a medicalization framework, a diagnosis of ‘‘elevated blood pressure’ pressure’’’ can be seen as an example of ‘‘deﬁning a naturally occurring attribute as a medical problem.’’∂∏ However, in contrast to psychiatric disease, critiques of medicalization of heart disease do not extend to challenging its very existence, to denying that problems with our hearts can make us sick and die. As well, in contrast to such disease categories as sexual dysfunction, heart disease is also not vulnerable to claims that it belongs only outside medicine. Thus, heart disease poses a worthy challenge. In the words of the physician and historian Robert Aronowitz: ‘‘A physician colleague of mine, wanting to stress the absurdity of relativist arguments about disease, thought she might deliver the coup de grâce by saying, ‘Now you’re going to tell me that heart attacks are socially constructed.’’’ ∂π It is precisely because no one can deny the existence of some biological reality to heart disease that thinking through the nature of social construction here can be particularly productive. Where discussions of psychiatric diseases can too often be bogged down in polarized exchanges about whether or not they have a biological existence, discussions of heart disease can begin in the nexus of biological and social realities. Where arguments for the social construction of psychiatric diseases can be misinterpreted as suggesting their spontaneous invention or unreality, arguments for the social construction of heart disease foreground the real embodied experience of social construction. The challenge Aronowitz accepts, to explore the ways that coronary heart disease ‘‘has been as much negotiated as it has been discovered’’ and the way that its ‘‘name, deﬁnition, classiﬁcation, and ultimate meaning . . . have been contingent on social factors f actors as much as strictly biological ones,’’∂∫ is inspiring to those in the emerging ﬁeld of history and social science of somatic disease. This book is deeply indebted to Aronowitz’s call. By considering the social construction of heart disease together with that of race and of pharmaceuticals, this book elaborates and extends his attentiveness to the contingencies in the social and biological. Organizing my analysis around heart disease is a way to make it more tangi-

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ble, even as it elides considerable heterogeneity within the term. In some sense heart disease has always existed—atherosclerosis has been described in EgypMarketing tian mummies, and e√orts to understand the heart in health and disease have Personalization ancient roots∂Ω—but it is also distinctly modern. A symptom proﬁle recognizAnalytics able as angina pectoris was ﬁrst described in Georgian England, and ﬁfty years ∑≠ laterAccept in Europe Save All and the United States. Heart disease came to prominence in both the United Kingdom and the United States in the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century, and the modern specialty of cardiology becomes recognizable in

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both countries by the 1920s;∑∞ that is the period in which this book’s story begins. Since the stabilization of heart disease as a ﬁeld of research, heart disease has been an umbrella disease category that includes heterogeneous phenomena of a few major types that increase the burden on the heart and/or and/ or cause it to fail.∑≤ Of course, as Joel Howell has argued, ‘‘the structure and content of cardiology, like that of all specialties and subspecialties, is historically mediated and constantly changing.’’∑≥ In the chronological presentation of the chapters of this book, di√erent categories of heart disease alternate as a focus of attention. In early car cardiology diology,, coronary heart disease was primary, and it was principally contrasted with infectious heart disease. Indeed, coronary disease has remained the principal focus of cardiology, and refers to those disease categories that are related to hardening and physical blockages of arteries, including arteriosclerosis, coronary thrombosis, and ischemic heart disease. In the Framingham study just after the Second World War, coronary disease was still the focus, but, through the study study,, hypertension became deﬁned as both a risk factor for f or coronary disease and as its own etiological model of heart disease. Hypertension as a disease category and African American hypertension as a disease category emerged together, in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, and the ‘‘slavery hypothesis’’ that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s has become a theory of di√erences in hypertension. The distinctions between heart disease categories have been enrolled in racial discourses—coronary heart disease has been associated with whiteness, and infectious heart disease and later hypertension has been associated with blackness. The drugs that I consider are for distinct forms of heart disease. The ﬁrst, a class of drugs called thiazide diuretics, is for hypertension (in all patients, and as we will see, especially in black patients). The second, BiDil, is for heart failure in ‘‘self-identiﬁed black patients.’’ Heart failure can be understood as the end stage of heart disease, whether hypertensive or coronary in etiology. etiology. In the evolution of what heart disease has been understood to encompass, there has

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been both continuity and discontinuity in articulations of race in heart disease, and in its medical approaches and treatments. Privacy Policy Heart disease has long been a particularly prominent and lucrative site for Marketing pharmaceutical development. Drugs to reduce heart disease risk played a key Personalization role in the historical development of the blockbuster drug model, which as Analytics Joseph Dumit has pointed out, generally operates on a logic not of curing Save Accept illness butAll of making normality dependent on drugs.∑∂ Amid the growing interest in the role of pharmaceuticalization in transformations of health, ∑∑ this

makes heart disease a rich site for inquiry. Heart disease also has promise as a site for inquiry into bioscience, because it has long resisted geneticization. ∑∏ As we grapple with an increasingly postgenomic biology,∑π race and heart disease can provide a distinctive site. As Evelyn Fox Keller presciently argued in 2000, 200 0, ‘‘Genes have had a glorious run in the 20th century,’’ century,’’ but ‘‘these very advances will necessitate necessit ate the introduction of other concepts, other terms, and other ways of thinking about biological organization, thereby inevitably loosening the grip that genes have had on the imagination of the life sciences these many decades.’’∑∫ Sickle cell anemia has been a particularly rich site for analyzing race in what Keller called ‘‘the century of the gene’’; the historian of medicine Keith Wailoo, for example, has used that disease to anchor his account of the politics of race and health in the ascendance of, and disillusionment around, genetic medicine. ∑Ω Scholars working in contemporary bios bioscience cience areas such as epigenetics have shown that models in the life sciences are shifting from conceptualizing genes as deterministic, to understanding them as necessarily contextual,∏≠ and the sociologist and sts scholar Jenny Reardon has considered ‘‘the postgenomic condition’’’ with particular attention to race.∏∞ tion’ Heart disease provides a useful taking-o√ point for analyzing race in the postgenomic era. There is already a glimmer that the intersection of race and heart disease is a fruitful site: Anne Fausto-Sterling, a biologist and sts scholar, has provided an intriguing discussion of how developmental systems theory matters for understanding race and hypertension.∏≤ If science and technology studies analysis of race does d oes not move beyond genetics as deterministic, it will be stuck in nature/nurture frameworks out of step with contemporary work both in biomedicine and in the historical and social studies thereof. Starting from a focus on heart disease, rather than on genetics or even postgenomics per se, can provide a fresh route to bring race into conversation with current medicine, cutting-edge science, and critical scholarship.

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Why Pharmaceuticals? Privacy Policy

Pharmaceuticals are objects that are very readily recognized as materialMarketing semiotic, where it is easy to make the case for the capacity of objects to carry Personalization both matter and meaning. Race is also a material-semiotic category, one that Analytics takes on a peculiar ontological status at its intersection with heart disease and pharmaceuticals. Racial disparities could conceptually be medicated away, in Save Accept All the sense that di√erences in such biomarkers of risk as blood pressure could be eliminated with medications. Yet racial di√erence cannot quite be medi-

cated away, in the sense that preoccupations with racial di√erences always exceed the data itself. Using disease categories and pharmaceuticals to think through race is productive if we accept that race, too, is irredeemably materialsemiotic, and cannot be purged of either aspect. A key insight of the burgeoning focus of science and technology studies scholarship on pharmaceuticals has been the creative productivity of the intersections of human identities with pharmaceutical practices, and it is therefore no surprise that the investigation of psychopharmaceuticals has been particularly rich.∏≥ The development of and contestation over the Pill on the one hand, and antiretrovirals on the other, have also provided fodder for these issues, and work on gendered diseases and especially hiv/aids is an important model for my work because it provides insight into mobilizations of identity-based social movements embracing and resisting disease categories and pharmaceuticals.∏∂ Historians within science and technology studies have attended to the reconﬁguring connections between research science, marketing, and distributions of pharmaceuticals for both psychological and somatic disease through the twentieth century.∏∑ The anthropologist and sts scholar Joseph Dumit has highlighted the role of pharmaceutical advertisements in constituting new grammars of identity in health and disease,∏∏ and as the cultural studies theorist Kane Race has argued, all medicines are ‘‘re-creational,’ ‘‘re-creational,’’’ sites for re-creating ourselves and our world.∏π Of course, as for example Alondra Nelson’s subtle account of race and genetic ancestry testing has shown, genetic facts can also be fodder for creative identity practices.∏∫ And as scholars interrogating the particular implications of genetics research on indigenous peoples have shown, the stakes for identity can be very high: the stories told by geneticists matter not only for the individuals involved, but also for group identities and relationships with nation-states. ∏Ω Forensic dna has tremendous power, in imprisoning and freeing from prison, and in the adjudication of human rights claims and postconﬂict states.π≠

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the primacy of intervention simultaneously on the social and the biological. Paying attention to pharmaceutical practices can highlight highlig ht the ways that mediPrivacy Policy cating is not isomorphic with geneticizing or biologizing. In too many critical Marketing studies of race and medicine, the terms ‘‘genetic,’ ‘‘genetic,’’’ ‘‘deterministic,’ ‘‘deterministic,’’’ and ‘‘bio‘‘bioPersonalization logical’’ are treated as synonyms. However, if we put pharmaceuticals at the Analytics center of the analysis and take their material an and d semiotic aspects seriously, seriously, we Save All haveAccept the opportunity to foreground the ways in which biological bodies are shaped by social experience and amenable to medical intervention. That is why

pharmaceuticals are key to my analysis, not only in the later chapters, which speciﬁcally analyze particular pharmaceuticals, but also in chapters about the durability of African American hypertension as a disease category, and about a genetic theory for the cause of African American hypertension. The immanence of the categorization of African American hypertension, and the therapeutic intervention of thiazide diuretics, is vital for understanding why and how diverse antiracist actors invoke distinctly African American disease. The ‘‘thinginess’’ of pharmaceuticals is also crucial to understanding their appeal; they operate on the symbolic order at the same time that they ‘‘make dis-ease concrete.’’π∞ Paying attention to the ways that pharmaceuticals become sites of exchange of both commerce and meaning-making gives us the opportunity to see how markets and meanings are coproduced. Rather than participating in nostalgia for a less commercialized medical era, we have the opportunity to interrogate proﬁt-driven medicine. Because analytical attention to the commodity fetishism of drugs has overwhelmingly focused f ocused attention on highly proﬁtable blockbuster drugs, proﬁt has been given too much explanatory power. Attending to a generic drug class (thiazide diuretics) and a commercially unsuccessful drug (BiDil) provides fresh terrain to consider both the possibilities presented by and the resistances to market logics.

Notes on Terminology: Why So Black and White? Readers may notice some slippery terminology and anachronistic framing in my account, on two levels: using current terms such as ‘‘African American’’ even when describing early cardiology, and using a bifurcated black-white framework in a multicultural America. The ﬁrst anachronism can be addressed quite succinctly: because I am centrally interested in how arguments about the past are enrolled in arguments in the present, I do not change quotes that describe ideas like ‘‘Negro health,’’

This website stores data such as cookies to enable essential site INTRODUCTION 21 functionality, as well as marketing, personalization, and analytics. You in addition may change your but, settings at any timeto putting them into historical context, I also bring them into or accept the default settings. contemporary terms. Moreover, overattention to ﬁdelity to terminology of a ∞

historical period can create the false sense that the deﬁnition of race was more Privacy Policy stable and circumscribed in the past than it is now—that everyone mobilized Marketing around ‘‘Negro health’’ shared a coherent understanding of what ‘‘Negro’’ signiﬁed—whereas I want to emphasize that the meanings of race have always Personalization Analytics been unstable and contested in each period. The second potential anachronism is more complicated to address. AlSave Accept All though the word ‘‘America’’ can refer to an entire hemisphere, in the dis-

courses I track and in my own use, America refers to the United States. The U.S. context is central to why I focus on black-white di√erence. Of course, even within the United States, not all notions of racial di√erence are black and white. The articulations of Asian immunity and risk through throughout out the period— from a 1931 invocation of ‘‘the calm, accepting Chinaman’’ by one early cardiologist,π≤ to the inclusion of a special session on Japanese populations parallel to the special session on African Americans at the 2005 American Society for Hypertension Meeting—could Meeting —could be the site of a comprehensive analysis of its own. Such an analysis would capture di√erent aspects of American citizenship and disease than mine does, because the citizenship of Asian Americans has been constituted so di√erently from that of African Americans.π≥ Attention to Hispanic/Latino heart disease is increasingly prominent, and, as Michael Montoya has demonstrated in his account of diabetes research, a fertile site for scholarly analysis.π∂ And yet, because the discourse of race and cardiovascular disease in the United States has overwhelmingly been one of black-white di√erences, those are justiﬁably central. Indeed, the racial preoccupations of articulations of heart disease, especially in the earlier period being described here but also today, reﬂect a broader situation. As Michael Brown and his colleagues argue, the ‘‘relationship of African Americans to whites therefore remains fundamental to any analysis of racial inequality.’ inequality.’’’π∑ They write of racism: ‘‘ ‘‘It It persists, in large part, because ‘whiteness’ has always been important in deﬁning who is and who is not an American. The original legislation that speciﬁed who could become a naturalized American was unequivocal: naturalization was restricted to white males. To further complicate matters, whiteness in the United States has never been simply a matter of skin color. Being white is also a measure, as Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres put it, ‘of one’s social distance from blackness.’ In other words, whiteness in America has been ideologically constructed mostly to mean ‘not black.’’’π∏

This website stores data such as 22 INTRODUCTION cookies to enable essential site functionality, as well as marketing, As we will personalization, and analytics. You see, in discourses of race and heart disease, Americanness has may change your settings at anyattime often been stake. As Warwick Anderson has argued with regard reg ard to whiteness or accept the default settings. ∞

in the history of racial science and medicine in Australia, ‘‘the clinic and the laboratory should be added to those sites where the nation—any nation—may Privacy Policy be imagined.’’ππ In the early period when degenerative forms of heart disease Marketing were deﬁned as typical of modern Americans, that was imagined to apply to Personalization whites, and—sometimes and— sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly— explicitly—not not to blacks. In Analytics the middle of the century when the Framingham Study longitudinally tracked a ‘‘normal Save Acceptor Allunselected’’ population, the whiteness was originally plural and attentive to the possibility of di√erences among white ethnic groups, but re-

ﬂected a broad sense that coronary disease was something that a√ected the white population.’’ If that was understood as something that excluded ‘‘non whites,’’ both longitudinal research and pharmaceutical practice has at the same time and increasingly since been centrally interested in the category of ‘‘nonblacks.’’ In all of this, my deﬁnition of race is purposely imprecise. Indeed, I believe that precision in deﬁnition is the wrong goal for any account of race in a society in which race is so complicatedly bound up with access to resources and power. For my purposes, the term ‘‘race’’ is a common noun that appears on census forms and on the medical histories that are so central to medical practice, a word with wide circulation in medical spheres and well beyond. If this seems a rather simplistic deﬁnition, it is because I am less interested in how race is deﬁned or ascertained than in how it is mobilized. (As Teresa De Lauretis asks with regard to gender: do you tick the box or does the box tick you?)π∫ I am looking at race as discourse (in a Foucauldian sense),πΩ which is of course not to say that race is merely discursive—not in a context in which race plays such a central role in access to resources and broader lived experience. I do not put the term race in scare quotes, even though I am sympathetic with many who do. I do not think that what Catherine Eagan has called ‘‘undermining quotation marks’’ do any such thing.∫≠ Such quotes, in the words of one linguist, disavow responsibility: ‘‘What the writer is doing here is distancing himself from the term in quotes. That is, ∫∞ he’s saying ‘Look, that’s what they call it. I’m not responsible for this term.’’’ But my goal in this book is not to create distance from medical invocations of race, but rather to engage with them. Many scholars who use scare quotes in reference to race do so to posit something of a straw man: some other who ‘‘really believes’’ in the racial categories that antiracist scholars know better than to believe in. This illusion that scare quotes can distance the speaker from responsibility

INTRODUCTION 23 This website stores data such as cookies to enable essential site ˇ zzek forasterms is similar to what the theorist Slavoj Ziˇ ek describes in Lacan’s lecfunctionality, as well marketing, personalization, and analytics. You tures on atheism: since the true site of beliefs is not n ot in conscious acts but in the may change your settings at any time unconscious—not just ‘‘deep in me’’ but ‘‘out there’’ in ‘‘my practices, rituals, or accept the default settings. ∞

and interactions’’∫≤ —professing not to believe becomes much more compliPrivacy Policy cated. And indeed, division between those with critical notions of race and Marketing those with uncritical ones does not correspond with any particular terminology choice, and straddles any medical/social science line. I am interested in Personalization tracking both the mobilizations of and retreats from characterizing disparities Analytics as racial. Save Accept The fearAll of being responsible for race is one better addressed directly than disavowed. As Jacques Derrida reminds us, we are guilty insofar as we are

responsible.∫≥ As I argue most explicitly in my conclusion, innocence is not a possible moral stance for anyone participating in discourses of race, and so our subject position must be, b e, in Donna Haraway’s terms, ‘‘noninnocent.’’ ‘‘noninnocent.’’∫∂ W Wee should not try to shirk responsibility.

Overview The structure of this book is roughly chronological, beginning early in the twentieth century. Chapter 1 considers preoccupations with coronary heart disease, race, and modernity of the founders of cardiology and their contemporaries in the period between 1910 and the Second World War. I suggest that existing explanations of cardiology’s rise can be both enriched and problematized by analyzing the ways in which these accounts are imbued with the racial frameworks of the period. I read founders of cardiology as theorists of a cardiovascularized modernity, in which both cardiovascularity and modernity are racialized. Claims of racial di√erence in heart disease etiology were present at the founding of heart disease research. The taxonomy of di√erential etiology by race of the period—that posited whiteness as connected to (noninfectious) coronary disease and blackness as connected to (infectious) rheumatic and especially syphilitic heart disease—was part of broader narratives about white degeneration and progress, and black infectiousness and uplift. Thus, ongoing contestations that African Americans do get coronary disease are part of laying claim to participation by African American patients in the modern American way of life, and by African American physicians in modern American medicine. Chapter 2 analyzes the contingent and emergent racialization of the Framingham Heart Study, an extremely inﬂuential longitudinal study that began

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This website stores data such as cookies to enable essential site in a Massachusetts town just after the Second World War. The chapter argues functionality, as well as marketing, that the homogeneous whiteness of Framingham emerged only as its early personalization, and analytics. You may change your settings at any time investigators both disavowed the imperative to representation and maintained or accept the default settings.

their embrace of extrapolation, and as intrawhite ethnic di√erence was becoming less salient in describing di√erence among Americans. The chapter also Privacy Policy draws the Framingham Study into comparative relief with the all-black JackMarketing son Heart Study, which began in 2000 and continues into the present. The Personalization latter study does not merely repeat Framingham in a new population, but is Analytics rather a self-consciously postmodern repetition with a di√erence. The Jackson Heart Study both supplements and fragments notions of who can stand in as a Save Accept All typical enough American from whom to extrapolate. Chapter 3 grapples with the durability of African American hypertension as

a disease category. Hypertension has been a principal site of disparities research, and physicians and many others have used African American hypertension as a way to both articulate di√erence and advocate intervention. The chapter is centrally interested in why it is that clinician-researchers in the area of African American hypertension alternate between opening up the disease for scientiﬁc inquiry—asking wide-ranging questions about the etiology of disparities—and setting aside the ambiguities to advocate treatment. It describes the historical emergence of African American hypertension in the 1960s and ’70s at the conﬂuence of the emergence of hypertension as a risk factor, rearticulations of older, racialized infectious-versus-coronary distinctions, and civil rights discourses. It was appealing as a site of physician mobilization, both because it allowed them to participate in cutting-edge medical research and practice, and allowed them to use newly available pharmaceutical treatments to decrease the heart disease risk of their patients. The chapter also outlines ongoing etiological debates, and shows that doubts about the relative role of socioeconomic class, psychosocial stress, and other factors, do not undermine the durability of race, r ace, but rather bolster it. Amid alternative ways of understanding the etiology of disparities, the recordability of race makes it more durable than any alternative, distinctly amenable to being enrolled in demands for action. The fourth chapter focuses on one particular theory of African American hypertension that has drawn particularly vociferous critique, the slavery hypothesis, and argues that it should be understood in the context of epistemological eclecticism and interventionist medicine, rather than genetic determinism. It provides close readings of invocations of the theory in diverse venues,

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This website stores data such as epidemiology journals to the Oprah Winfrey Show. The chapter ranging from cookies to enable essential site unpacks these invocations of the slavery hypothesis both to illustrate the hetfunctionality, as well as marketing, personalization, and analytics. You erogeneity of ideas about race and about medicine that can be enrolled in may change your settings at any time racialized or accept the default settings. invocations of disease, and to argue that although the evidentiary

basis for the theory is indeed weak, e√orts to stamp out the theory may be a misplaced use of antiracist energy. The chapter attends particularly closely to Privacy Policy an invocation of the theory outside of a medical or clinical encounter, in which Marketing Henry Louis Gates Jr. responds to a presentation of the theory by reporting his Personalization own consumption of hydrochlorothiazide and identifying himself as a ‘‘saltAnalytics saving Negro.’’ This provides a bridge to the next chapter, which brings attenSave tion Accept to that All drug class to the fore. Chapter 5 moves the focus more centrally to pharmaceuticals by attending

to medical debates about thiazide diuretics, a class of antihypertensive drugs that has been linked to African American hypertension as a disease category. Recent government-funded research has promoted thiazides as an a√ordable and e≈cacious way to treat hypertension in everyone, and especially in black patients, and I describe a debate in which that research is contested. Because thiazides are generic, attending to the commodity fetishism around them pro vides the opportunity to see that drugs’ relationships with preoccupations with di√erence exceeds their role in narrow economic interests. Attention to the commodity aspects of thiazides—especially the inextricability of their use value (e≈cacy) and their exchange value (price) (price)—shows —shows that the appeal of (or aversion to) drugs is not limited to marketing. Because of the conﬂuence of the drug for blacks and the cheap drug, it becomes a site for diverse articulations of racialized American biological b iological citizenship. In the debates about the particular appropriateness of thiazide diuretics or of brand-name alternatives, African Americans are betwixt and between pharmaceutical grammars of basic care and consumerist freedom. Consideration of these drugs that are at once racialized, proven, old, and cheap, provides an opportunity to consider how debates over drugs can articulate debates over the nature of inclusion and di√erence in American ways of life. Chapter 6 turns to the drug that has been a focus of renewed interest in race and medicine among science and technology studies scholars: BiDil. This chapter tracks the contingent development of this branded combination of two generic drugs at the intersection of race and heart failure. When it won the fda’s approval in 2005, BiDil became the ﬁrst drug ever approved for use in a speciﬁc race, bearing the indication for heart failure in ‘‘self-identiﬁed black

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patients.’’’ The blatancy of its racialization has attrac patients.’ attracted ted considerable scholarly

This website stores data such as critique,site and yet much of the critique has leaned too heavily on old arguments cookies to enable essential functionality, as well as marketing, about race and genetics on the one hand, or about blockbuster drugs on the personalization, and analytics. You other. at Neither may change your settings any timeof these lines of critique is up to the task of deconstructing a or accept the default settings. drug that is simultaneously e√ective in treating symptoms and delaying death,

supported by diverse epistemologically eclectic actors, and commercially unPrivacy Policy successful. The chapter highlights the divergent goals of the various actors Marketing that aligned around BiDil’s approval. For the Association of Black CardioloPersonalization gists, the fda, and the pharmaceutical company NitroMed, BiDil was a means Analytics to address di√erent problems, and these actors should not be analytically colSave

lapsed. The chapter foregrounds the speciﬁcity of heart failure as a disease Accept All category, and critiques assumptions that drugs inevitably reach their markets. It also argues that BiDil has undecidabilities: the drug is irredeemably phar-

makon (remedy and poison), and it is material-semiotic. Attempts by some of

those mobilized for and against the drug to purge either side of those undecidabilities are unsuccessful. Drugs, like race, are both material and semiotic, and there is an inescapable polyvalence of a ‘‘black drug’’ in this current historical moment. The conclusion highlights the relevance of this book’s account for race and medicine and for medical ethics, as well as reviewing the continuities and discontinuities in the intersections of race, heart disease, and pharmaceuticals recounted in the book. It is organized around a close reading of a juncture at which a debate about race and medicine broke down, after positions on BiDil were framed as an oppos opposition ition between those ‘‘down with the people’ people’’’ and those ‘‘up in the academy.’’ I argue that race and medicine is best characterized as plural noninnocent discourses, rather than as racists versus antiracists. Race is a topic about which neither activists nor academics should feel comfortable, and discussion would better proceed by acknowledging that all engagement with it is noninn noninnocent. ocent. I frame th thee book’s relevance for broader questions in medical ethics by exploring the ways that BiDil ﬁt into, and failed to ﬁt into, traditional quandary ethics. I argue that our project should be to make medicine answerable to justice, not to provide answers to narrowly framed ethical quandaries. Attention to generative dissonance should be a resource for scholarly engagement, and I hope that race seems more di≈cult to come to terms with after reading the book than it had bef before. ore. Closing with contemplation of the myth of the hydra, I argue that any decrease in the durability of race in medicine can only follow its decreased importance in broader preoccupations

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with di√erence, and that if we ever leave an account of race and medicine feeling satisﬁed that we have understood it, debunked de bunked it, or even staked out an This website stores data such as cookies to enableinnocent essential site position on it, we are in error. Inspired by prophetic pragmatism, and functionality, as well as marketing, committed to ethical noninnocence, I suggest that although there is no place of personalization, and analytics. You may change your settings at any time engagement above the fray, fray, there is, nevertheless, hope. or accept the default settings.

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Medicating Race by Anne Pollock

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