Over the last decade or so the study of health activism in the postwar United States has produced a sizable literature, attracting scholars from a number of disciplines. Work on AIDS activism and patient advocacy around breast cancer, written mainly by sociologists of science, helped to establish the field in the mid-1990s – though these interests were quickly poached by those working in medical anthropology, the history of medicine, and sociology in general. Since then, studies of the women's health movement by the anthropologist Sandra Morgan (2003) and on citizenship and biomedicine by the sociologist Adriana Petryna (2002, 2009), and the historian John Dittmer's assured account of the Medical Committee for Human Rights (2011), have all helped to shuffle health activism to the fore of scholarly attention.

To date the literature has been notable for the congeries of interests and approaches taken. Still, in the US, the literature has produced at least three clear lines of inquiry. These include, first, transformations in the health sciences and curricula reforms within American medical schools brought about by the types of activism that Naomi Rogers (2001) and Lundy Braun (2003) have uncovered; second, the prominence of women's health activism and reproductive justice campaigns, which, as Jennifer Nelson (2003) and Wendy Kline (2010) have shown, grew out of the organizing campaigns of urban minority communities; and third, the vital role that civil rights protests and divisions of race played as stimulants to the formation of such groups. Now the sociologist Alondra Nelson places the Black Panther Party at the intersection of these three modes of investigation in her estimable study Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination.

Both historians of health activism and scholars of the Black Panther Party in general will find much of interest in Nelson's study. Her insistence that the provision of medical care proved “an indispensible element of the Party's politics” (5) will certainly encourage further reflection as to how we characterize the organization, and the trajectory of organizing within which we locate it. Nelson shows that the party's gradual and complicated embrace of health activism should not be used to support the view that the Panthers moved from revolutionary to reformist politics in these years. Rather, “health offered [a] new moral terrain” (xv) for activists. This was a moment when struggles for citizenship broadened from a focus on legal segregation to a concern for the way in which minority communities were simultaneously exploited and abandoned by welfare institutions. The shift manifested itself in a number of ways. Here the discussion falls on three elements of the Panthers' program: the creation of community clinics (the People's Free Medical Clinics) which began in some cities in 1968, an elaborate campaign to educate and test people of color for sickle-cell anemia which ran from 1971 until 1975, and the 1973 protest that the Panthers led against UCLA's proposed Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence. In the course of narrating these programs, Nelson raises a number of questions seldom posed by historians of the organization. She is to date alone in showing how the Panthers funded their community projects, for example, and, along with earlier, sterling studies by Robert Self (2003), Devin Fergus (2009), and Donna Murch (2010), one of the few to illuminate the coalitions that the organization formed which made such programs possible.

Her argument has two parts. First, she uses the party's health activism to demonstrate the organization's parallel concern for both theory and praxis. Historians have long recognized that the likes of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Frantz Fanon, and Mao Zedong exerted a considerable pull over the Panthers. Nelson makes this point through some fine-grained examples. She points out that two of these theorists (“Che” Guevara and Fanon) had a training in the medical sciences that textured their notion of the political, and she shows how party members who visited Mao's China in 1972 and saw “barefoot doctors” at work were inspired to devise similar methods for providing medical care to the urban communities they served. Second, and relatedly, Nelson contends that the Party recognized that minority groups were “underserved by the medical establishment and overexposed to that establishment's racial research” (xiii). This is an insightful way of thinking about the study of race and medicine in the postwar US, taking us beyond the well-worn explanatory model of “scientific racism.”

In the book's most empirically impressive chapter, Nelson describes the “centrepiece of [the Party's] health activism” (112), namely the clinics that the organization established around the country. By the spring of 1973 approximately fifteen such clinics had been created, and the photographs that appear in this work give us a sense of what those in Boston and Berkeley looked like. It would seem the majority of these facilities “mainly provided basic health care” (106), undertaking physical examinations; checking blood pressure; and providing immunization for children, pelvic examinations for women, and simple procedures for all, alongside a series of public-health campaigns. But there was some local variation: a Panther clinic in Portland also offered dental care; the one in Berkeley, eye tests; and in LA members were shown how to treat the effects of tear gas. While Body and Soul gestures at these variations, it pays slightly less attention to the local political constituencies from which such ventures arose. In fact, the work's prevailing explanation suggests that the impetus for the creation of these clinics came from the national office. But the evidence suggests a different interpretation, with the causal arrow pointing from branches in cities like Seattle and Chicago to those in Berkeley and Oakland. When, in early 1970, Bobby Seale announced that chapters should include healthcare facilities, for example, Panther clinics already existed in Kansas City, Chicago, Portland, Seattle, and Los Angeles.

The party's two other projects, its sickle-cell anemia campaign and its advocacy against UCLA's violence center, had much clearer roots in the Bay Area. In both cases, Nelson describes the “lay–expert network that undergirded and facilitated” (xiv) these, and other, campaigns. This is a vintage approach among sociologists of science, but Body and Soul adds some interesting wrinkles to it, describing how new technologies allowed lay activists to test for sickle-cell anemia without physicians' supervision, and how the party's newspaper created a forum in which first-person accounts of those suffering with the condition were given as much weight as biomedical understandings. In their opposition to the proposed violence center at UCLA, the Panthers, working closely with a plethora of New Leftist groups, posed an even more direct challenge to medical authority, telling the California Senate Committee on Health and Welfare that from their own experiences of prison life it was unlikely that prisoners would be free to grant consent to researchers. It is one more way in which the party valorized experiential knowledge, while also revealing that “the evolution of its health politics owed a great deal to its collaborations” (159). Indeed, the party's reliance upon and work with a wide array of left-wing activists, and university-trained and campus-based figures, weakens the work's veiled suggestion that higher-educational institutions were straightforwardly incubators of “campus-originated black cultural nationalism” (55), and thus distinct from the Black Panther Party's street-based revolutionary nationalism. Indeed, there is much here to support Donna Murch's contention that the Panther's relied on “dialogue … between the study group[s] and street rallies” (92).

If some five years ago the literature on the Black Panther Party was, in David Garrow's view, “weak and modest” (2007), such is no longer the case. Despite my minor objections, Body and Soul is a valuable addition to the literature on this organization, rendering the Black Panthers in greater complexity than most other accounts have achieved, and pointing the way to archival collections largely untapped. On occasions it is alert to the ironies and ambiguities between the organization's myriad health campaigns: it notes the contradiction between the Party's attempt to play down racial essentialism in its campaign against the violence center, and its accentuation of that value in its work on sickle-cell anemia. For these reasons, Body and Soul promises to bring scholarship on health activism to a wider body of scholars, at the same time as it offers those already working on these topics an improved register for thinking about the study of race and health.