Health problems of the empire: past , present, and future

Western medicine has begun a reckoning with its inconvenient pasts, from dethroning medical heroes to an increasing awareness of how doctors have treated colonized and enslaved populations. A statue of the “father of modern gynecology,” J. Marion Sims, was removed from New York City’s Central Park in 2018 after protestors in “blood-spattered” hospital gowns objected to glorifying a doctor who experimented on enslaved Black women (Figure 1).1 In 2020, the release of video recorded by Joyce Echaquan, an Indigenous woman who died in a Quebec hospital as nurses repeated racial slurs, sparked street protests. Medical students at the University of Pittsburgh are rewriting their Hippocratic oath to include a commitment to social justice. Medical journals, professional medical associations and public health authorities in several North American cities have declared structural racism a public health crisis.