Medicine by the People

A grassroots history of American medicine that shows how regular people were architects of medical knowledge and care.

Most histories of medicine center doctors: the standard-bearers of expertise and innovation. Yet these narratives underplay the role that ordinary people have, and always have had, on medicine and public health.

In colonial America, Black people’s knowledge led to smallpox inoculations, stymying that epidemic. Midwives, more plentiful than doctors, also delivered babies more successfully. The Black community of the early 1900s educated the public on preventing tuberculosis. In the last half of the twentieth century, the Young Lords fought for better sanitation and increased medical infrastructure in their East Harlem neighborhood and queer people pushed the federal government for HIV/AIDS research with their activism. Grassroots community care has always been at the cutting edge of medicine, a hidden tradition of meeting need with dignity. Medicine by the People reveals that the history of American healthcare is, at its heart, a struggle over who gets to tell the story of illness.