Ayah Nuriddin

Ayah Nuriddin

Contributor

Ayah Nuriddin is a PhD candidate in the Department of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. Her dissertation will examine the ways in which African Americans mobilize heredity and eugenics in service of racial uplift and black liberation. She also works on the histories of birth control, psychiatry, biology, and scientific racism.

Clio Reads

Remembering the Mothers of Gynecology: Deirdre Cooper Owens’ Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology

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Antebellum physician James Marion Sims has been in the news quite a bit lately as a target of activism. After the Charlottesville white supremacist rallies, efforts to take down Confederate monuments have spread across the country, and those efforts have included statues of James Marion Sims. Sims is known for developing a successful technique for… Read more →

History

The Black Politics of Eugenics

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Eugenics is still a dirty word. It makes us think about science gone horribly wrong. It reminds us of the ghosts of Nazis past. The specter of eugenics is invoked when discussing new genetic technologies, often serving as a warning that engineering humanity can go too far. It wasn’t always like this. For much of… Read more →