| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health. By Keith Wailoo. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. xii, 338 pp. Cloth, $34.95, ISBN 0-8078-2584-0. Paper, $16.95, ISBN 0-8078-4896-4.)

Keith Wailoo's latest book, Dying in the City of the Blues, analyzes the changing historical and cultural meanings of sickle-cell anemia, a disease named for its sickle-shaped blood cells. Focusing on Memphis, Tennessee, Wailoo demonstrates that "modern urban medicine's concepts of disease were themselves problematic and evolving, defined by local cultures and context." He also tells a national story, however, chronicling the changing meanings of the disease decade by decade and documenting the rise of scientific and popular representations of this so-called "Negro disease." It is a well-documented, sophisticated study by an important scholar in the field of race and American medicine. 1

Wailoo documents the construction of a disease discourse, moving from "James Herrick's microscopic detection of sickled cells in the blood of a patient in 1910" to President Richard M. Nixon's inclusion of the disease in his health message to Congress in 1971. He points out the scientific visibility provided by the research of the pathology professor Lemuel Diggs in the 1930s and "Linus Pauling's discovery of the molecular mechanism of sickled red blood cells" in 1949, but he also documents the social visibility provided in popular culture with examples from such magazines as Time and Jet and celebrities such as Sidney Poitier and Bill Cosby. . . .

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