A TOUR DE FORCE THAT DIAGNOSES THE STRUCTURAL ROOT OF THE VIOLENCE
THAT PLAGUES US ALL.
Trauma surgeon and professor Dr. Brian H. Williams has seen it all:
gunshot wounds, stabbings, and traumatic brain injuries. In _The
Bodies Keep Coming_, Williams ushers us into the trauma bay, where the
wounds of a national emergency amass.
As a Harvard-trained physician, Williams learned to keep his head down
and his scalpel ready. As a Black man, he learned to swallow the rage
when patients told him to take out the trash. Just days after the
tragic police shootings of two Black men, Williams tried to save the
lives of police officers shot in Dallas in the deadliest incident for
US law enforcement since 9/11. Thrust into the spotlight in a nation
that loves feel-good stories about heroism more than hard truths about
racism, Williams came to rethink everything he thought he knew about
medicine, injustice, and what true healing looks like.
Now, in raw and intimate detail, Williams narrates not only the events
of that night in 2016, but the grief and anger of a Black doctor on
the front lines of trauma care. Working in the physician-writer
tradition of Atul Gawande and Damon Tweedy, Williams diagnoses the
roots of the violence that plagues us. He draws a through line between
white supremacy, gun violence, and the bodies he tries to revive, and
he trains his surgeon's gaze on the structural ills that manifest
themselves in the bodies of his patients. What if racism is a feature
of our healthcare system, not a bug? What if profiting from racial
inequality is exactly what it was designed to do?
Black and brown bodies will continue to be wracked by all types of
violence, Williams argues, until something changes. Until we transform
policy and law with compassion and care, the bodies will keep coming.
Les mer
Dispatches from a Black Trauma Surgeon on Racism, Violence, and How We Heal
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9781506483139
Publisert
2023
Utgiver
Stylus Publishing LLC
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter