Penn Bioethics Seminar (PBS): "Medical and Scientific Construction(s) of Race: A History in Brief" - Rana A. Hogarth, PhD, MHS

12:00pm - 1:00pm • 3600 Civic Center Blvd., Rm. 7-031

2026-06-23 12:00:00 2026-06-23 13:00:00 America/New_York Penn Bioethics Seminar (PBS): "Medical and Scientific Construction(s) of Race: A History in Brief" - Rana A. Hogarth, PhD, MHS Medical and Scientific Construction(s) of Race: A History in Brief Rana A. Hogarth, PhD, MHS Associate Professor History of Science / History of Medicine University of Pennsylvania Deans' Distinguished Visiting Professorship Program This talk examines the long history of race making within medicine and its allied fields in the Americas. It pays special attention to medical claims that defined Black people’s bodies as peculiar in relation to whites. These claims trafficked in anti-Black racism and were deployed to legitimize the idea of innate racial differences. They shaped the contours of medical knowledge production from the era of slavery and beyond; they were features, not aberrations in the production of Western biomedical knowledge about human bodies. This talk concludes by highlighting the enduring influence of anti-Black racism on the development of early twentieth-century eugenics. By foregrounding the process through which medicine and science constructed Blackness, Dr. Hogarth offers a new way of understanding the rise of eugenics—one that positions it as less a reactionary science and more an articulation of a long and deliberate process of race-making that still continues to this day. 3600 Civic Center Blvd., Rm. 7-031 Penn Medical Ethics

This talk examines the long history of race making within medicine and its allied fields in the Americas. It pays special attention to medical claims that defined Black people’s bodies as peculiar in relation to whites. These claims trafficked in anti-Black racism and were deployed to legitimize the idea of innate racial differences. They shaped the contours of medical knowledge production from the era of slavery and beyond; they were features, not aberrations in the production of Western biomedical knowledge about human bodies.

This talk concludes by highlighting the enduring influence of anti-Black racism on the development of early twentieth-century eugenics. By foregrounding the process through which medicine and science constructed Blackness, Dr. Hogarth offers a new way of understanding the rise of eugenics—one that positions it as less a reactionary science and more an articulation of a long and deliberate process of race-making that still continues to this day.