Lauren D. Olsen is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology within the College of Liberal Arts at Temple University.
Lauren Olsen’s Curricular Injustice is a pioneering, scrupulously researched, and long overdue analysis of the consequences of race-aversive medical education in the United States. A major accomplishment of this book is its explanation of how racially naïve medical educators persuaded themselves that exposing medical students to “medical humanities” courses could replace a serious engagement with the racial dimension of medicine -- John Hoberman, Professor, University of Texas at Austin Olsen incisively specifies how medical educators misunderstand the social sciences and humanities and misrecognize the salience of these disciplines for healthcare. Curricular Injustice shows why medicine, as currently taught, will continue to marginalize patients, and what must change for health systems and providers to offer more humane and equitable care. -- Janet K. Shim, Professor of Sociology, University of California, San Francisco Olsen pairs keen analysis with engaging writing to show how curricular reforms intended to ameliorate inequality actually reinforce it. Curricular Injustice is more than an update to such classics as Boys in White; it reveals an understudied mechanism through which medicine’s investment in inequality endures. -- LaTonya Trotter, Associate Professor, University of Washington Medicine