AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

ONE OF TIMES 100 MOST INFLUENTUAL PEOPLE IN GLOBAL HEALTH

This book is more than a memoirit also serves as a call to action to create a more equitable healthcare system for patients of color, particularly Black women. Essence

Legacy is both a compelling memoir and an edifying analysis of the inequities in the way we deliver healthcare in America. Uch Blackstock is a force of nature. Abraham Verghese, MD

[An] extraordinary family story. The New York Times Book Review

Required reading for all medical students. Gayle King, CBS Mornings

The rousing, captivating story of a Black physician, her career in medicine, and the deep inequities that still exist in the U.S. healthcare system

Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, it never occurred to Uch Blackstock and her twin sister, Oni, that they would be anything but physicians. In the 1980s, their mother headed an organization of Black women physicians, and for years the girls watched these fiercely intelligent women in white coats tend to their patients and neighbors, host community health fairs, cure ills, and save lives.

What Dr. Uch Blackstock did not understand as a childor learn about at Harvard Medical School, where she and her sister had followed in their mothers footsteps, making them the first Black mother-daughter legacies from the schoolwere the profound and long-standing systemic inequities that mean just 2 percent of all U.S. physicians today are Black women; the racist practices and policies that ensure Black Americans have far worse health outcomes than any other group in the country; and the flawed system that endangers the well-being of communities like theirs. As an ER physician, and later as a professor in academic medicine, Dr. Blackstock became profoundly aware of the systemic barriers that Black patients and physicians continue to face.

Legacy is a journey through the critical intersection of racism and healthcare. At once a searing indictment of our health-care system, a generational family memoir, and a call to action, Legacy is Dr. Blackstocks odyssey from child to medical student to practicing physicianto finally seizing her own power as a health equity advocate against the backdrop of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement.