Garcia, Richard, MD

Sick and Tired: Race, Medicine, and Jazz Garcia, Richard, MD

Jazz, the quintessential American art form, serves as a blueprint for these personal essays that wrestle with inequalities in medicine based on "race." Sick and Tired is a collective of stories, personal essays, letters, vignettes, and song, as it were, that challenges the concept of race, itself, and considers the possibility of American action toward addressing real, physical differences in health outcomes between the races. Poverty, to be sure, is important in understanding unequal health realities in America; but race, itself, persists even in the face of whatever progress so far. This is gruesomely and predictably demonstrated in the current pandemic.

As with jazz, the audience is most critical here. This book addresses the rhetorical triad - speaker, speech, audience - and calls upon the audience, the way the preacher calls upon the pews, to join in the solution to the human condition rooted in millennia of conflict with the other.

Dissonance is the word in bebop jazz. These chapters are rooted in science, social science, and literature. At once, they call upon the audience to participate in would-be solutions that promise to vary across the varied communities. That is, the responses will be particular, like the audience participating in live jazz.

These personal essays are intended for an audience interested in race, health outcomes, healthcare costs, and a literary approach that suggests artistic ways into the quagmire, and human catastrophe, of race and medicine.