Annabel Sowemimo is an NHS doctor, a registrar in sexual and reproductive health, and an academic and broadcaster on the intersection of race and medicine. Her new book, Divided, began as a column on decolonising healthcare for gal-dem – an influential platform for writers of colour – which, sadly, recently closed. Those articles have led to this important and ambitious title, which seeks to educate readers about the racist origins of western medicine, asking for recognition of the mistreatment of patients in the past, and calling for a correction to systemic and institutionalised discriminatory practice.
She is refreshingly honest about the lack of easy answers and acknowledges her frustration. “Well, what do you suggest we do instead then?” as a master’s student asks in the epilogue. But Divided is a necessary book, and pertinent, if also of its time in that it reads as if much of it was written during the pandemic, fuelled by those terrifyingly pointed losses of BAME clinicians in spring 2020 (the first 20 NHS workers who died from the virus were non-white). It soon became obvious that BAME staff were disproportionately exposed and dying from the virus, at risk from the patients for whom they provided care. Sowemimo felt she “had to write the book” as no one could deny “that health inequalities and uneven power relations exist”.
