Recognizing Historical Injustices in Medicine and the Journal
The Journal and other medical institutions have historically advocated and justified the mistreatment of groups on the basis of their race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and physical or mental conditions. To grapple with this history, we have commissioned an independent group of historians to examine various aspects of these biases and injustices. The series is meant to start a conversation, to help us learn from our mistakes and equip us to prevent new ones from occurring.
Featuring contributors to our “Recognizing Historical Injustices in Medicine and the Journal” series, this symposium examines discrimination against women, intersex people, and sexual and gender minority groups.
Featuring contributors to our “Recognizing Historical Injustices in Medicine and the Journal” series, this symposium examines the Journal’s relationships to eugenics and Nazism.
Given that medicine and the Journal have long pathologized homosexuality and gender nonconformity, it should not be surprising the LGBTQ+ communities continue to face large health disparities.
Featuring contributors to our “Recognizing Historical Injustices in Medicine and the Journal” series, this symposium examines the treatment of racially marginalized populations in the Journal over the centuries.
Over its history, the Journal circulated ideas about innate sex differences that facilitated essentialization of women to their reproductive roles and exclusion of women from medicine, among other ills.
During the social tumult of the 1960s and 1970s, the Journal opened its pages to advocates of reform in the profession and society at large, but it did not completely break with its troubled racial past.
Between 1935 and 1944, the Journal remained all but silent regarding the heinous motives of Nazi science and medicine. What is the nature and significance of silence in the face of such oppression?
From the early 20th century until well after World War II, the Journal amplified attention to eugenics and provided important support among medical professionals for the U.S. eugenics movement.
As the Journal explores its history and acknowledges its role in voicing and perpetuating racism and discrimination, it must examine how it grappled with the problem of difference.
Racism against Indigenous people infected Journal articles about civilization, Indigenous medicines, disease susceptibility, and possible Indigenous extinction, but the erasures are equally striking.
Founded by men whose families profited from slavery, the Journal provided a prominent forum where physicians perpetuated race hierarchies before and after the Civil War.
A new series examines biases and injustices that the Journal has helped to perpetuate over its history, in the hope that reckoning with our past will help us prevent harm in the future.
Featuring contributors to our “Recognizing Historical Injustices in Medicine and the Journal” series, this symposium examines discrimination against women, intersex people, and sexual and gender minority groups.
NEJM Podcast: Intention to Treat
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Over its 200-plus years, the Journal has sometimes published articles that have perpetuated injustices against various groups of people. A new Perspective series explores that history and its lessons.
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In the second half of our podcast series on historical injustices, guests Evelynn Hammonds and David Jones examine the racism of post-World War II American medicine and its lessons for the present day.
