Emergent Medicine: Emergent Economies

Looking at the institutional records of King-Drew Medical Center, and founding actors in emergency medical systems such as James O. Page, this talk will discuss how federal and local officials turned to take advantage of Black Los Angeles’s number of gunshot wounds and stabbing victims to produce new life-saving technologies. The talk will also address how the demonstration of emergency medical technology and infrastructure through the racialized injured urban subject helped augur the infrastructure and expertise of war/military medicine for domestic use while increasing the profitability and demand for emergency medicine in white suburban enclaves. The effect not only normalized emergency medicine but also prevented citizens from making deeper demands on the government to pass gun control, legislate new anti-poverty programs, and end racial inequality.

Nic John Ramos is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He has previously held a faculty appointment in History and Africana Studies at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and has served as the Ford Postdoctoral Fellow in the Program in Race, Science, and Society at the University of Pennsylvania and as the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow of Race in Science and Medicine at Brown University. His book published with the University of California's Press, Health as Property: Racial Capitalism and Sexual Liberalism in Los Angeles, reveals how responses to racism can be predatory, harmful, and dangerous to poor people of color.