Born with clubfoot — a congenital foot deformity where the foot turns inward and downward — Christopher Willoughby wore casts and underwent several corrective surgeries until age 9. The treatment changed his gait and his life.

“I’m not going to join any professional (sports) teams, but I can do a lot of things that wouldn’t have been imaginable for people a century ago,” said the assistant professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies and author of the book, Masters of Health: Racial Science and Slavery in U.S. Medical Schools.

Thanks to his parents’ good health insurance and tenacity in seeking the best care, he had a positive outcome and view of medicine. Now as an expert in Atlantic slavery, U.S. medicine, and racism, he knows not everyone is so fortunate. That’s why he’s teaching a course in the College of Liberal Art's Department of Interdisciplinary, Gender, and Ethnic Studies on the development of and disparities in American healthcare.

In Race, Gender, and the Making of Modern Medicine (AAS 433D), Willoughby teaches undergraduate and graduate students from various disciplines about the evolution of the American medical profession from the founding of the country to the progressive push for reproductive healthcare. The course also delves into the impact of race, gender, and class on the accessibility, quality, and cost of modern healthcare.

“There’s something amazing about medicine, how much good it can do and the impact it can have on people’s lives. But if you don’t have access to it, it’s altogether different,” Willoughby said.

Why is it being taught?

Willoughby said, "I’ve had the privilege of speaking at medical schools, talking to medical students, and having colleagues who are medical faculty. We realize how little education there is on the structural history of medicine and how things like healthcare came into existence, along with medical schools and related professions, especially situated within the larger social, political, and economic context of the last 500 years."

"Having a chance to talk to students about this before they enter medical school will lead to having a better understanding of how the medical profession interacts and affects everyday people’s lives beyond its presentation of life-saving cures. This trains them to have a little humility and to see where their individual work as a physician will fit into a structure. I think that’s one of the joys of the class," he added.

Who’s taking it?

This semester, the class has 16 undergraduate students as well as two graduate students in history who are taking it as an independent study. "The grad students come to the lecture, and then we meet separately to discuss some books and they do different assignments. The undergraduates are a mix of mostly history, African American studies, and gender and sexuality studies majors, but we have several students in pre-healthcare professions," said Willoughby.

What’s something students might be surprised to learn?

"Before 1700, if you were a rural person in England, you could think of health care and medicine as a right. You would’ve received it in your community from your family, not necessarily from a physician. There was a general premise that as a community member, you deserve care. You didn’t let someone die alone in the street. You didn’t leave anybody sick or untreated.

"The commercialization of medicine is relatively new, a product of medicine becoming a very important professional service rather than something provided communally by family members and friends. It reminds us that there are things lost with progress. It doesn’t matter about your political beliefs or aspirations for the future; we can learn from how people did things in the past."

What excites you the most about teaching this course?

"Taking a really long look at the evolution of medicine, it gives me a lot more humility for what people knew in the past and how they behaved and thought of their communities.

"I started this journey as someone who had a real uncritically positive view of technological and scientific progress. I haven’t lost that wonder for the natural world and science, but I also have more caution for what progress can destroy," said Willoughby.

How does this course connect to students’ future careers?

"I tell my students, we’re all patients; we all need to understand how the health care system works. Medicine is intimate, it’s rich, and it affects all our lives in some way," said Willoughby.

Knowing how these institutions came into existence will help students understand how to navigate the motives within the system and become a stronger patient advocate — for themselves and for others, he said

"In this class, students learn a lot about society and how the world came into existence through the lens of medicine and its racial and gender components. Anybody who might work with insurance, in a hospital administrative unit, or even at a university would learn a great deal about the origin of healthcare. Anyone who’s touching medicine — through social work or psychology or who interacts with our health care system — would benefit," suggested Willoughby.

What should even lay people know from this course?

Part of the course explores how some people who were experimented on didn’t always receive the benefits of the medical breakthroughs they contributed to. "When enslaved people didn’t have full citizenship in the United States," he said, "they didn’t benefit from the various medical breakthroughs that their bodies were used to make."

He cited the “Mothers of Gynecology,” enslaved African women who endured repeated infection and surgeries without anesthesia to aid Dr. J. Marion Sims in his attempts to advance obstetrics and gynecological care, as an example. "As Sims became ostracized in the medical community in Montgomery, Alabama, he trained some enslaved women to act as surgical nurses. Today a memorial there honors enslaved women Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey to acknowledge that they were trained and gained expertise in medical practice, yet were erased from the story of Sims’ success,” he said.

"This class is one of the bright sides for people who might be skeptical of this type of history, for different groups of people who in the past didn’t feel any ownership over U.S. history," Willoughby said. "Telling a fuller account of history allows people to see themselves. Sometimes that means being angry, and sometimes that means a new sense of pride in the accomplishments of people who might look like you."