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This chapter first explains how the American medical establishment has never mobilized on behalf of the African American population. That the ongoing medical calamity experienced by the African American population since the Emancipation of 1865 has never provoked the public outrage or the political mobilizations associated with other forms of racial injustice and suffering, such as Jim Crow segregation and the repression of black voting rights. The discussions then turn to the medical defamation of black people by whites in positions of authority; evidence that doctors employ racially motivated thinking when dealing with patients of color; American medicine's ambivalence toward the hundreds of studies documenting racial disparities in health care; liberal analysis of physician behavior; and the creation of a racially differentiated human biology that has influenced medical thinking in significant ways.

This chapter explains how triage in the intake jail, CJ1, possess the hallmarks of decision-making and prioritizing that characterize the medical triage seen in emergency rooms and disaster zones. These processes contain not just a practical but a moral dimension, one that involves reckoning someone's health-related deservingness in the face of finite resources. In jail triage, the criteria for this calculus of health-related deservingness were guided in part by official San Francisco's Jail Medical Care (JMC) protocols. Determinations about deservingness were also affected by the reality of tending to people who might not otherwise get treated outside of jail, and whose treatment occurred in a space of punishment; in other words, it was an active, contingent process of care.

This chapter fist sets out the book's purpose, which is to describe how doctors think about racial differences and how this kind of thinking affects the treatment of their patients. The book details how mainstream medicine devised racial interpretations that have been applied to every organ system of the human body. The discussions then turn how the general awkwardness surrounding racial issues in society bleeds into medicine; why the medical profession has never systematically studied how physicians produce racially motivated diagnoses and treatments that can cause medical harm; physicians' oral tradition that conveys racial folkloric beliefs from one generation to the next; whether the racial attitudes of physicians differ from those of the general population; and medical liberals' exculpatory approach to physician responsibility.

Illness is our common fate. The country of the ill, no matter how widely shared its terrain, is not a universal realm located outside the influence of space and time. Indeed, the country of the ill assumes the distinctive features of whatever nation or social group inhabits it. It is a slippery place in which the condition depends not only on biological processes but also on gender, race, and income. Black patients in the United States, for example, get measurably worse care than white patients—including care as specific as standard procedures for heart disease and chest pain. The vast social changes during the last fifty years of the twentieth century—the period usually designated postmodern—have in effect reshaped the experience of illness.

The author says the last month was a record-breaking one for the field hospital in terms of blood use. Because the numbers of casualties were not significantly different from previous months, this meant that people were getting increasingly badly injured, fueled by more powerful and often badly contaminated improvised explosive devices. The author also discusses the controversy sparked by one of the doctors' comments that the field hospital should stop giving one of the Afghans more opiates as he wouldn't get the same pain medications in any local hospital. After mentioning the day's casualties, he describes the three helicopter crews that were in charge of the evacuation of casualties: MERT, Dustoff, and Pedro. MERT is a British-staffed medical crew, comprising a physician, one or two advanced paramedics, and an emergency nurse. Dustoff and Pedro are American-staffed helicopter crews with a limited level of medical care.

Kwan Mun Hau, an original village and research focus, was re-sited in 1964, as the villagers could no longer tolerate the flooding in the old village resulting from unplanned development of surrounding areas, and government hopes to rationalize the development of the central area where the village had been located. This sealed the villagers’ move to a cash economy, a mixed benefit, with many employed in industry and some receiving rents from tenants of diverse origins, many of whom ran small factories. The lineage trusts were also converted to rent-yielding urban property. Families were still large, with many children, but their structures were limited by the configuration of the new houses. Interest in birth control was high. All children now went to school, studying in Cantonese, the lingua franca, which was also promoted by the increasing presence of television. Western medicine was readily available, but the very old were still cared for at home.