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Name Dropping: Toward a Uniform Best Practice on Historical Commemoration in Medicine

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2022

Joseph M. Appel
Joseph M. Appel*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychiatry, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, 1 Gustave L. Levy Place, New York, New York 10029, USA
*
Corresponding author: Email: jacobmappel@gmail.com
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Abstract

The removal of controversial names and monuments from the public sphere in the United States has gained traction in the context of efforts to achieve social justice for historically mistreated and marginalized communities. Such debates are increasingly raising issues in the healthcare setting as hospitals and medical schools grapple with the legacies of figures whose scientific contributions are clouded with ethical transgressions. Present efforts to address these challenges have largely occurred at the institutional level. The results have been guidelines that are complex, highly inconsistent across institutions, and largely downplay the symbolic importance of such historical redress. This paper proposes a simpler three-part test for name and monument removal in the medical and hospital settings that places greater weight on the symbolic importance of the renaming process itself instead of only considering the outcomes.

Keywords

social justicerenamingmonument removalhistorical redressbest practicemarginalized communities
Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , January 2022 , pp. 16 - 22
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

Notes

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