Malicious Intent

Do we want to perpetuate a Jim Crow health system?" A brilliant, idealistic physician asked that question in Alabama in 1966. Her answer was no—it led to her murder. Unearthing the truth of Jean Cowsert's life and death is a central concern of David Barton Smith's Race, Murder, and Medicine. Unearthing the grim history of our healthcare system is another.

Race-related disparities in American death rates, exacerbated once again by the Covid-19 pandemic, have persisted since the birth of the modern U.S. medical system a century ago. A unique but fundamentally racist history has prevented the United States from providing the kind of healthcare assurances that are taken for granted in other industrialized nations. The underlying story is one of political, medical, and bureaucratic machinations, all motivated by a deliberate, racist design. In Race, Murder, and Medicine, David Barton Smith traces the Jean Cowsert story and the cold case of her death as a through line to explain the construction and fulfillment of an unequal healthcare system that would rather sacrifice many than provide for Black Americans.

Cowsert's suspicious death came at a key moment in the struggle for universal healthcare in the wealthiest country on earth. Race, Murder, and Medicine is a history of those failed efforts, and a story of selective amnesia about one doctor's death and the movement she died for.