Sharing "Untold Stories" of Health Care History
In recognition of Black History Month, the African, Black, and Caribbean Employee Resource Group and the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center hosted an event titled “Untold Stories in Health Equity,” highlighting overlooked leaders in health care and encouraging participants to document and share other untold stories.
The event was based on a class of the same title taught by Heather Butts, associate professor of health policy and management at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. From a young age, Butts has been interested in history, particularly parts that have been overlooked, including perspectives from a variety of viewpoints.
“My fascination with history started with an interest in what we do not know, and then over time, evolved into an understanding that the more you know, the more you don't know,” Butts said. “There's so much out there that we really don't know anything about. You could have the same story or the same topic, but 20 different people would tell that story in 20 different ways.”
Butts shared several untold stories that she had encountered during her research, including that of Alexander Thomas Augusta, the first Black surgeon commissioned in the Union Army during the Civil War and the first Black professor of medicine in the United States. In researching Augusta’s life and career through old documents and interviews with his descendants, Butts realized that there were likely other important stories that had been lost over time and should be told to have a fuller understanding of health care history.
Incorporating a range of perspectives into our collective understanding of history impacts the larger cultural and historical narrative, according to Butts. She encouraged attendees at the event to start from a place of curiosity and from an assumption that the information available is necessarily incomplete, as more perspectives and stories can always be found.
“Pursuing a more complete understanding of our history allows us to move forward to our present and our future,” Butts said. “It's really difficult to be able to move forward when you don't have a complete reckoning and understanding of what came before.”
Butts led attendees in an exercise to begin uncovering more stories in health care, including those from their own families and communities. Attendees shared the stories they found with the group, and Butts offered to work with attendees on promoting the stories.
Following the lecture and exercise, Butts participated in a fireside chat with Stephanie Lovinsky-Desir, associate professor of pediatrics and assistant director of HICCC, to dive more deeply into issues surrounding health equity, including how untold stories can help establish social change that and values making good health available to all.
“I think it's extremely difficult to have equity conversations when there are whole peoples missing from the conversation,” Butts said. “When you don't know the contributions of whole peoples and whole nations, we can’t have a real conversation about health equity. And the most frightening thing to me is that we don't know they're missing, and we don't know enough to bring them into the story. It’s a lot of work, but that needs to be rectified, and it starts with all of us.”