Diabetes

Arleen Marcia Tuchman is Nelson O. Tyrone Jr. Professor of History at Vanderbilt University specializing in the cultural history of medicine. She is the author of Science, Medicine, and the State in Germany and Science Has No Sex: The Life of Marie Zakrzewska, M.D.

“Arleen Marcia Tuchman convincingly shows in her illuminating book Diabetes: A History of Race and Disease . . . [the] deep roots in the medical establishment’s dark bigotry concerning the origins of the disorder.”—Jerome Groopman, New York Review of BooksWinner of the George Rosen Prize, sponsored by American Association for the History of MedicineWon the PROSE award, History of Science, Medicine, and Technology, sponsored by the Association of American Publishers“Arleen Tuchman’s Diabetes is a remarkable work, a fascinating history of how a disease is understood, medically and socially, illuminated by an understanding of the strange and shifting perspectives of race and racism.”—Perri Klass, author of A Good Time to Be Born: How Science and Public Health Gave Children a Future“This is a superb, deeply researched history of the role of racism and class bias in perceptions of type 2 diabetes. Its root causes? Poverty and discrimination—a new vision for a prevention agenda.”—Marion Nestle, author of Food Politics“This landmark study not only reveals the history of Type 2 diabetes, which may well become the most important disease of twenty-first-century America, but also shows us how it has been associated with various ethnicities from the beginning of its recognition.”—Margaret Humphreys, author of Marrow of Tragedy: The Health Crisis of the American Civil War“In this careful study of disease, difference, and disparity, Arleen Tuchman has made a lasting contribution to the histories of science, medicine, race, and racism, with broad implications for American history and public health policy writ large.”—Jeremy A. Greene, author of Prescribing by Numbers: Drugs and the Definition of Disease“Meticulous, insightful research reveals diabetes to have become not one, but many diseases based on the perceived race, culture, and responsibility of sufferers, its innocent or guilty victims.”—Jacalyn Duffin, author of History Medicine: A Scandalously Short Introduction