This summer, History of Medicine minor Karlye Price received a UReCA Summer Fellowship for a project entitled “Generational Impact of Racism on Black Americans and the Medical Industry’s Bias in Diagnosis: A Historical Critical Analysis.” She used the funds to travel to archives and talk with other historians. Her journey led her to Emory University, Howard University, and the Smithsonian National Anthropological Archives.
At the archives, she focused on the works and unpublished notes of the physical anthropologist W. Montague Cobb (1904-1990) and his mentor Thomas Wingate Todd. During her trip, she was also able to meet Dr. Joseph Graves of North Carolina A&T State University, a contemporary evolutionary scientist working on genetics, who has authored several books on race and medical science. Her research looks at how the two Black scientists, Cobb and Graves, have dealt with the concepts of race in American medicine, and how they combatted racism in medicine.
