October Narrative Medicine Rounds with Dr. Uché Blackstock

**Dear colleagues in Narrative Medicine, Because of sudden changes in the Columbia University calendar, we are obliged to postpone the Narrative Medicine Rounds scheduled for October 1, 2025 featuring Dr. Uché Blackstock and Dr. Hetty Cunningham. An alternate date is now being sought.**

We acknowledge that our scheduling procedures failed to recognize that Yom Kippur begins that evening. Our responsibilities to honor all cultural traditions were not honored by scheduling a university event on that evening. We deeply regret this late change, and we commit ourselves to ever strengthening our capacity to recognize all members of our multi-cultural community.

For our second rounds of the fall semester, we have the supreme privilege of welcoming Dr. Uché Blackstock, the founder and CEO of Advancing Health Equity (AHE), who appears regularly on MSNBC and NBC News, and is a former associate professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine and the former faculty director for recruitment, retention, and inclusion in the Office of Diversity Affairs at NYU School of Medicine. Dr. Blackstock's generational memoir, LEGACY: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine was published by Viking Books on January 23, 2024 and became an instant New York Times best-seller.

In Legacy, Blackstock journeys 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. Blackstock’s odyssey from child to medical student to practicing physician—to finally seizing her own power as a health equity advocate against the backdrop of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement.

Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, it never occurred to Uché 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. Uché Blackstock did not understand as a child—or learn about at Harvard Medical School, where she and her sister had followed in their mother’s footsteps, making them the first Black mother-daughter legacies from the school—were 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.

In 2019, Dr. Blackstock founded AHE which partners with organizations to drive measurable change in health outcomes by embedding equity into leadership, strategy, and clinical practice.  In its five years of existence, AHE has helped major companies, hospitals, and health systems create strategic plans for promoting equitable health care moving forward.

Dr. Blackstock’s writing, including numerous OpEds, has been featured in the Chicago Tribune, Scientific American, the Washington Post and New York Magazine.  

She was recognized by Forbes Magazine, in 2019, as one of “10 Diversity and Inclusion Trailblazers You Need to Get Familiar With", in 2023 by Fortune Magazine as one of "13 Innovators Shaping the Future of Health”, and in 2024, as one of TIME's "100 Most Influential People in Health". In 2025, she received the NAACP Dr. Williams Cobb Montague Health Equity Award.

Dr. Blackstock received both undergraduate and medical degrees from Harvard University, making her and her twin sister, Oni, the first Black mother-daughter legacy graduates from Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Blackstock currently lives in her hometown of Brooklyn, New York, with her two school-age children.

Dr. Blackstock will be in conversation with Hetty Cunningham, MD, Associate Professor at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and Director of the Narrative Medicine Portfolio curriculum at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. Since joining the Department of Pediatrics faculty in 1998, Dr. Cunningham has worked to improve health equity at all levels, with a particular focus on curriculum and faculty development in the areas of health disparities, implicit bias, social determinants of health, race in medicine, cultural competency, communication skills, and narrative medicine for medical students, residents, and faculty. Dr. Cunningham is a second-generation Harlem resident, where she lives, sees patients from birth to age 21, and teaches pediatric residents at a NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital-affiliated community-based practice. She can be seen as expert health disparities discussant in the Smithsonian Channel film The Color of Care, by acclaimed director Yance Ford, produced by Oprah Winfrey.

Narrative Medicine Rounds are monthly rounds held on the first Wednesday of the month during the academic year, hosted by the Division of Narrative Medicine in the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. Rounds are supported by live captioning. If you have any other accessibility needs or concerns, please contact the Office of Disability Services at 212-854-2388 or disability@columbia.edu at least 10 days in advance of the event. We do our best to arrange accommodations received after this deadline but cannot guarantee them. A recording of tonight’s Virtual Narrative Medicine Rounds will be available for 30 days to those who register.