Proposes that medical treatment should be seen as a site of, rather than an alternative to, political and social contestation

In Medicating Race, Anne Pollock traces the intersecting discourses of race, pharmaceuticals, and heart disease in the United States over the past century, from the founding of cardiology through the FDA's approval of BiDil, the first drug sanctioned for use in a specific race. She examines wide-ranging aspects of the dynamic interplay of race and heart disease: articulations, among the founders of American cardiology, of heart disease as a modern, and therefore white, illness; constructions of "normal" populations in epidemiological research, including the influential Framingham Heart Study; debates about the distinctiveness African American hypertension, which turn on disparate yet intersecting arguments about genetic legacies of slavery and the comparative efficacy of generic drugs; and physician advocacy for the urgent needs of black patients on professional, scientific, and social justice grounds. Ultimately, Pollock insists that those grappling with the meaning of racialized medical technologies must consider not only the troubled history of race and biomedicine but also its fraught yet vital present. Medical treatment should be seen as a site of, rather than an alternative to, political and social contestation. The aim of scholarly analysis should not be to settle matters of race and genetics, but to hold medicine more broadly accountable to truth and justice.

"“Both provocative and important for the study of race and/in medicine. . . . Pollock’s book serves well in highlighting the importance of considering the entirety of the social world (including the biomedical) with the same political and moral concerns borne by more traditional social theory.”" - Somatosphere

"“This book is masterfully performative and empirically rich, offering insight to scholars of race, feminist science and technology studies, medical anthropology and sociology.”" - Sociology of Health & Illness

"“[Pollock] offers a richer contextualization of the way race figures in medicine that positions medical science not as an exclusive or absolute authority, but one among many forms of ordering and reasoning about the simultaneously social and technical world we inhabit. ..  Pollock above all makes clear how different forms of knowledge, belief and reasoning are woven through the forms of collective organization and stratification sociology seeks to understand.”" - Sociology

"“Pollock provides insights for scholars interested in the mechanisms by which ‘race’structures medical practice, scientific knowledge development and pharmaceutical capital in the USA. She develops a compelling historical account of the varied meanings and significance of ‘race’ in the longer development of medical knowledge and practices constitutive of heart disease and, by extension, the wider field of American medicine.”" - Global Public Health