“Building the Worlds That Kill Us: Disease, Death, and Inequality in American History”
by David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz
2024
Columbia University Press
$28
408 pages
Nearly five years ago, while interviewing residents along the Mississippi River in Louisiana for a book, authors David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz learned that they’d caused a brouhaha. Large corporations in the area, ones that the residents of “a small, largely African American community” had battled over air and soil contamination and illness, didn’t want any more “agitators” poking around and asked a state trooper to see if the authors were going to cause trouble.
For Rosner and Markowitz, this underscored “what every thoughtful person at least suspects: age, geography, immigrant status, income, wealth, race, gender, sexuality, and social position largely impacts the quality and availability of medical care.
It’s been this way since Europeans first arrived on North American shores and brought diseases that decimated established populations. There was little-to-no medicine offered to slaves on the Middle Passage because a ship owner’s “financial calculus included the price of disease and death.”
Factory workers in the late 1800s and early 1900s worked long days under dangerous conditions, and health care was meager. And just three years ago, reports showed people of color disproportionately lived in areas where the air quality was dangerous.
This book is essential reading if you care about national health issues, worker safety, and inequality in medical care.
