February is ending. It’s a good moment to reflect on the connections between Black history and modern medicine.
Black History Month will fold itself back into the calendar — tucked quietly into March, into spring, into what we like to call ordinary time. As if history has seasons. As if it takes breaks. The intersection of Black history and modern medicine is reflected in these ongoing cycles of awareness and progress.
It doesn’t.
History remains. It lives in the techniques we’ve inherited without questioning their origins. In the buildings we walk through without thinking about who built them. In the language we reach for without wondering who first spoke it. In the bodies we treat — and in the ones that went untreated, unstudied, uncounted. Truly, Black history and modern medicine are deeply intertwined, shaping how care is given and received.
It remains in what was recorded. And perhaps more powerfully, in what was not.
Black history is not a sidebar to American history. It is not a chapter that begins in slavery and ends at the Civil Rights Movement. It is not an annual acknowledgment, a month-long gesture before we return to business as usual. It is the foundation. The ground everything else was built on — some of it with consent freely given, much of it without.
Some stories were preserved with care. Others were reduced to footnotes, or erased entirely, or simply never written down at all — because the people who lived them were never given the pen.
And still, the work continues.
The question was never whether we inherit history. We do. All of us, whether we asked to or not. The question is what we choose to do once we understand that. Additionally, Black history and modern medicine ask us not to look away, but to engage thoughtfully with the past and its lessons.
Do we look away because it’s uncomfortable? Do we flatten it into something easier to hold — cleaner, simpler, less demanding? Or do we let it do what hard truths are supposed to do: shape us into something more careful, more honest, more just? Clearly, reflecting on Black history and modern medicine brings us to these crucial questions.
This month is ending.
But the responsibility to remember — to really remember, not just acknowledge — that doesn’t end with February.
For a deeper exploration of Black history in gynecology, read What Was Learned from Her Body.
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