Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health

Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health By Keith Wailoo (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001) (338 pages; $34.95 cloth; $16.95 paper).

In Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health, Keith Wailoo chronicles the transformation of sickle cell anemia from an inchoate and clinically inconsequential malady into a prominent disease symbolizing the African-American social experience. Focusing on Memphis, Tennessee, a major center of sickle cell research and treatment, Wailoo shows how regionalism, racial politics, and the growth of the health-care industry in the late twentieth century contributed to the visibility of this previously obscure condition. Although the story is, in part, "a narrative of the invisibility of pain and of the long struggle for recognition and power . . . it also explores how, why, and under what circumstances the [health-care] system has granted visibility and assigned value to the ailments of black people" (p. 13).

As a beacon of New South prosperity, Memphis attracted scores of migrants hoping to leave behind the stultifying poverty of sharecropping. Rapid urbanization strained municipal services, including...