Diabetes, Arleen Marcia Tuchman
Diabetes, Arleen Marcia Tuchman
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

Diabetes
A History of Race & Disease

Author: Arleen Marcia Tuchman

Narrator: Kirsten Potter

Unabridged: 8 hr 46 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 08/05/2020


Synopsis

Who is considered most at risk for diabetes, and why? In this thorough, engaging book, historian Arleen Tuchman examines and critiques how these questions have been answered by both the public and medical communities for over a century in the United States.

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Tuchman describes how at different times Jews, middle class whites, American Indians, African Americans, and Hispanic Americans have been labeled most at risk for developing diabetes, and that such claims have reflected and perpetuated troubling assumptions about race, ethnicity, and class. She describes how diabetes underwent a mid-century transformation in the public's eye from being a disease of wealth and "civilization" to one of poverty and "primitive" populations.

In tracing this cultural history, Tuchman argues that shifting understandings of diabetes reveal just as much about scientific and medical beliefs as they do about the cultural, racial, and economic milieus of their time.

About Arleen Marcia Tuchman

Arleen Marcia Tuchman is a professor of history at Vanderbilt University specializing in the cultural history of medicine. She is the author of Science, Medicine, and the State in Germany and Science Has No Sex: The Life of Marie Zakrzewska, M.D.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Jenn on July 27, 2022

What causes diabetes? Long story short, racism and poverty. This book taught me so much about thinking critically and reading between the lines. The author is a compelling writer who spent over 20 years on this content!......more

Goodreads review by Socraticgadfly on September 06, 2020

A solid four-star book. The biggest new thing I learned was that diabetes was once considered the "Jewish disease," attendant with both racial and cultural stereotypings that, as the author notes, later passed on to Blacks, Hispanics and Asians. On those later stereotypes, Tuchman notes that they got......more

Goodreads review by Kaitlyn on April 24, 2021

Good information, but very tenuous to read. Would have prefered reading an article about this instead of a book. But provides good detail if that’s your thing.......more

Goodreads review by Roz on November 03, 2020

This was a very interesting exploration of the shifting views of diabetes in regards to race over the 20th century in the United States. Tuchman charts the various groups that medical scientists focused their attention and concern most heavily on, starting with Jews at the turn of the century, and e......more

Goodreads review by Tutankhamun18 on April 24, 2022

This book charts the changing cultural context surrounding diabetes and who gets it. Each chapter is devoted to one group of people to whom diabetes was at one time thought to be particularly prevelant. Starting with it being seen as a Jewish disease, the author shows us how biased gthis perception......more