The Library's Health Sciences Historical Collections is pleased to present a screening of the award-winning documentary, POWER TO HEAL: MEDICARE AND THE CIVIL RIGHTS REVOLUTION on Wednesday, November 20 at 5:00PM in GEB A204. The screening will be followed by a lecture by Dr. Karen Kruse Thomas, an advisor for the film. Refreshments will be served. The event is open to students, staff, and faculty. Please contact archivist Jennifer Langford at jwelch30@uthsc.edu for more information.

POWER TO HEAL is an hour-long public television documentary that tells a poignant chapter in the historic struggle to secure equal and adequate access to healthcare for all Americans. Central to the story is the tale of how a new national program, Medicare, was used to mount a dramatic, coordinated effort that desegregated thousands of hospitals across the country in a matter of months.

Karen Kruse Thomas, PhD is the historian of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She earned a PhD in twentieth-century US history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with a focus on southern, African-American, and medical history. POWER TO HEAL draws from her first book, Deluxe Jim Crow: Civil Rights and American Health Policy, 1935-1954, which examines how the notion of “deluxe Jim Crow” (government support for health care that maintained segregation) "was at the center of the politics of race and region that shaped early federal health programs.” Her second book, Health and Humanity: A History of the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, 1935-1985, examines the recent history of public health through the lens of the oldest and largest school of public health.

Thomas has won prizes from the American Association for the History of Medicine.  Her work has received funding from the Harry Truman Presidential Library and the National Endowment for the Humanities.