Department of Health and Social Services Library

Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, it never occurred to Uche Blackstock and her twin sister, Oni, that they would be anything but physicians. In the 1980s, their mother headed an organisation of Black women physicians, and for years the girls watched these fiercely intelligent women in white coats tend to their patients and neighbours, host community health fairs, cure ills, and save lives. What Dr. Uche Blackstock did not understand as a child - or learn about at Harvard Medical School, where she and her sister had followed in their mother's footsteps, making them the first Black mother-daughter legacies from the school - were the profound and long-standing systemic inequities that mean just 2 percent of all U.S. physicians today are Black women; the racist practices and policies that ensure Black Americans have far worse health outcomes than any other group in the country; and the flawed system that endangers the well-being of communities like theirs. As an ER physician, and later as a professor in academic medicine, Dr. Blackstock became profoundly aware of the systemic barriers that Black patients and physicians continue to face. Legacy is a journey through the critical intersection of racism and healthcare. At once a searing indictment of our healthcare system, a generational family memoir, and a call to action, Legacy is Dr. Blackstock's odyssey from child to medical student to practicing physician - to finally seizing her own power as a health equity advocate against the backdrop of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement.