Shortly after the dawn of the twentieth century, the New York City
Department of Health decided to address what it perceived as the racial
nature of health. It delivered heavily racialized care in different
neighborhoods throughout the city: syphillis treatment among African
Americans, tuberculosis for Italian Americans, and so on. It was a
challenging and ambitious program, dangerous for the providers, and
troublingly reductive for the patients. Nevertheless, poor and
working-class African American, British West Indian, and Southern
Italian women all received some of the nation's best health care during
this period.
Health in the City challenges traditional ideas of early
twentieth-century urban black health care by showing a program that was
simultaneously racialized and cutting-edge. It reveals that even the
most well-meaning public health programs may inadvertently reinforce
perceptions of inferiority that they were created to fix.