A tour de force that diagnoses the structural root of the violence
that plagues us all. Trauma surgeon and professor Dr. Brian H.
Williams has seen it all: gunshot wounds, stabbings, and traumatic
brain injuries. In The Bodies Keep Coming, Williams ushers us into the
trauma bay, where the wounds of a national emergency amass. As a
Harvard-trained physician, Williams learned to keep his head down and
his scalpel ready. As a Black man, he learned to swallow the rage when
patients told him to take out the trash. Just days after the tragic
police shootings of two Black men, Williams tried to save the lives of
police officers shot in Dallas in the deadliest incident for US law
enforcement since 9/11. Thrust into the spotlight in a nation that
loves feel-good stories about heroism more than hard truths about
racism, Williams came to rethink everything he thought he knew about
medicine, injustice, and what true healing looks like. Now, in raw and
intimate detail, Williams narrates not only the events of that night
in 2016, but the grief and anger of a Black doctor on the front lines
of trauma care. Working in the physician-writer tradition of Atul
Gawande and Damon Tweedy, Williams diagnoses the roots of the violence
that plagues us. He draws a through line between white supremacy, gun
violence, and the bodies he tries to revive, and he trains his
surgeon's gaze on the structural ills that manifest themselves in the
bodies of his patients. What if racism is a feature of our healthcare
system, not a bug? What if profiting from racial inequality is exactly
what it was designed to do? Black and brown bodies will continue to be
wracked by all types of violence, Williams argues, until something
changes. Until we transform policy and law with compassion and care,
the bodies will keep coming.
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Dispatches from a Black Trauma Surgeon on Racism, Violence, and How We Heal
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9781506483139
Publisert
2023
Utgiver
Vendor
Broadleaf Books
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter