Uché Blackstock's incisive memoir, Legacy, charts her journey as a Black female physician while calling out the pervasive, systemic racism in American medicine. Blackstock and her twin sister, Oni, always knew they would be physicians like their mother, Dale, a Harvard Medical School graduate who spent decades caring for her community in Brooklyn. Both girls grew up with role models of dedicated Black female physicians, and both have pursued medicine as a career. But as Blackstock notes, neither their childhood nor their education gave them a full picture of the racism that permeates American medicine.
Blackstock traces her journey through medical school at Harvard, her residency back in Brooklyn, and her work specializing in ultrasound technology and curriculum. She calls out the toxic environment she later found at NYU School of Medicine, where she spent nearly 10 years practicing, teaching, and working on diversity initiatives. Throughout her narrative, Blackstock includes anecdotes of Black medical professionals who pioneered advances in medicine, Black patients treated badly by the system, and the tireless work of her colleagues of color to protect and care for their own communities. She gives a vivid account of her time working in urgent care during the Covid-19 pandemic, and her decision to found a health advocacy organization focused on correcting racial health inequities. Urgent and insightful, Blackstock's memoir is a fascinating account of her medical career and a clarion call to the American medical system to give Black patients the care they deserve. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams