The Iago Galdston Lecture - Inequalities Unmasked: What Pandemics Reveal About Race and U.S. Society, from Yellow Fever to COVID-19

As a part of The New York Academy of Medicine Library’s History of Medicine series, this lecture will analyze the social inequalities revealed over the course of the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 and 2021 in the United States, in relation to past pandemics—from yellow fever through cholera, influenza and HIV/AIDS. The talk aims to understand the full range of health and social challenges unmasked by pandemics past and present; to discuss disparities along lines of race, politics and region; and to examine how knowledge of disparities can become a basis for designing more equitable and responsive public health and healthcare systems.

About the Speaker
Keith Wailoo, PhD, is the Henry Putnam University Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University, where he teaches in the Department of History and the School of Public and International Affairs, and is the current president of the American Association for the History of Medicine.

Dr. Wailoo is an award-winning author on drugs and drug policy; race, science and health; and genetics and society; and he is known also for insightful public writing and media commentaries on history of medicine, pandemics and society, and medical affairs in the U.S. He has authored numerous books including Pushing Cool: Big Tobacco, Racial Marketing and the Untold Story of the Menthol Cigarette (University of Chicago Press, 2021); How Cancer Crossed the Color Line (Oxford University Press, 2011); and Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health (University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

He has also published works on medical history and health affairs in many publications, including The New York Times, The New England Journal of Medicine, Bulletin for the History of Medicine and more.

The recipient of numerous honors, in 2007 Dr. Wailoo was elected to the National Academy of Medicine. In 2021, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and also received the Dan David Prize for his “influential body of historical scholarship focused on race, science, and health equity; on the social implications of medical innovation; and on the politics of disease.”

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