Specialization

“Specialists in pediatrics, radiology, cardiology, and ophthalmology also saw people with the malady as important research opportunities. These sufferers became valued, at least in part, because of the way they legitimated research agendas. Sickel cell patient could be studies by geneticists, pediatricians, hematologists, and pathologists as they struggled to develop the insights of molecular biology in their own fields” (Wailoo II, 116-117). . . . in venturing into the Diggs-Kraus [sickle cell] clinic [at Univ. of Tennessee], patient also unknowingly entered a new economic system. Their pain, their infections, their complaints, and the other characteristics of their disorder were becoming increasingly useful – in raising community consciousness, in mobilizing resources, in building institutions, and in creating research programs” (127-128).