Who Gets to Do Medicine: Black Canadian Studies and Medical Education

Black studies both addresses the epistemic dilemma Eurocentrism makes of Blackness while also understanding Blackness as relational, situating Black activism and intellectual life as intricately connected. Yet discussions of Black studies have generally been excluded from the fields of science and medicine. In this article, I focus on three considerations of Black studies in these fields: Dalhousie University’s rotating senior research chair in Black Studies, which moved into the Faculty of Medicine in 2019; a reflection on the 1968 Sir George Williams Affair, which highlighted the harms anti-Black racism in science studies has upon Black students and communities; and lastly, an examination of who gets to do medicine in Canada. In the almost two-hundred-year history of medical education in Canada, systemic barriers remain in place that obstruct Black people from participating in medical training. I seek to explore how Black studies in medical education is more than an accounting of brutality and atrocities. Science and medical studies also include Black experiences through method, thought, and intervention, thus creating anew.