Every perceived physical difference conveniently supported Africans’ slave status. Defining disease in racial terms played an essential part in this biological strategy that was enshrined in biomedical research and practice. It was precisely “by locating disease in physiologic difference—be it susceptibility or resistance—that medicine served to mark blacks as deserving of their inferior social status in society,” writes Lundy Braun.10 Medicine has historically promoted a racial construction of disease that in turn perpetuates a biological construction of race.
