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Racism in Health: the harms of biased medicine

Nature Podcast

CHAPTER

Black People Have Less Lungs Than White People

Cartwright claimed that black people had lower lung capacities than white people. He even hypothesized that it was a mental illness which he called Repetomania that caused enslaved people to desire freedom. His work looked really like science and even I've found it cited as late as 2010 in a prominent US journal, their racism gets into the science they do. And yet these ideas quickly proliferated and were used to justify slavery using science.

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