To Study Wing

The Palace

The Lobby Pattern Thoughts Star of the Month Reading Room

The Reading Room

Where thinking has weight and silence is audible

Neurodivergence & Diagnosis

The Clinical Gaze and the Autistic Mind

What happens when the tools of diagnosis become instruments of exclusion rather than understanding?

Martha N. • 2024

Structural Competency in Psychiatric Training

Published in The Lancet Psychiatry—reimagining how we teach physicians to see systems, not just symptoms.

The Lancet Psychiatry • 2024

Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

The history of autism is not a medical story. It is a story of how society decides who is valuable.

Steve Silberman • 2015

The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism

You think I don't understand because I don't speak. But I understand everything.

Naoki Higashida • 2007

Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity

The mask is not a deception. It is survival. And it is killing us.

Devon Price • 2022

The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

I think in pictures. The medical world thinks in words. This is the gap we must bridge.

Temple Grandin • 2013

Divergent Mind: Thriving in a World That Wasn't Designed for You

The diagnostic manual has a gender. It is not neutral. It is male.

Jenara Nerenberg • 2020

The Electricity of Every Living Thing: A Woman's Walk in the Wild to Find Her Way Home

I was forty years old before I understood my own mind. How much earlier could I have known?

Katherine May • 2018

Health Systems & Structural Reform

The Architecture of Harm

Medical error is not individual failure. It is the predictable outcome of systems designed for speed over safety.

Martha N. • 2024

Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

The hospital was never a neutral space. It was built with Black pain.

Harriet A. Washington • 2006

The Social Transformation of American Medicine

The doctor-patient relationship was not lost. It was sold.

Paul Starr • 1982

An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back

The price of your surgery has nothing to do with the cost. It has to do with what they think you will pay.

Elisabeth Rosenthal • 2017

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

The war on cancer revealed our priorities. Some lives were worth more than others.

Siddhartha Mukherjee • 2010

Just Medicine: A Cure for Racial Inequality in American Health Care

Bias is not in the heart of the physician. It is in the structure of the system.

Dayna Bowen Matthew • 2015

The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence

We are not independent beings who occasionally need care. We are care-dependent creatures from birth to death.

The Care Collective • 2020

Race & Medicine

The Algorithm of Whiteness

How medical calculators encode race—and how those numbers determine who gets a kidney, a baby, or pain relief.

Martha N. • 2024

Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

Race is not a biological category that medicine discovered. It is a political category that medicine keeps alive.

Dorothy Roberts • 2011

Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

The state has always been interested in Black women's wombs. That interest has never been benign.

Dorothy Roberts • 1997

So Long a Letter

Friendship between women is not a luxury. It is the rope we use to climb out of the wells men dig for us.

Mariama Bâ • 1979

Black Man in a White Coat: A Doctor's Reflections on Race and Medicine

I learned to heal in a place that did not believe I deserved to be healed.

Damon Tweedy • 2015

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Her cells lived forever. She died in the colored ward, buried in an unmarked grave.

Rebecca Skloot • 2010

Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology

The speculum was tested on enslaved women without anesthesia. They were told Black women did not feel pain.

Deirdre Cooper Owens • 2017

Power & Institutions

The Credential as Weapon

How medical training confers the right to speak—and how that right is distributed unevenly across gender, race, and class.

Martha N. • 2024

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

The examination is a ritual of power. The patient does not just receive care. They receive a diagnosis of their place.

Michel Foucault • 1975

The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception

The clinic created a new kind of seeing. The patient became visible only through the physician's trained eye.

Michel Foucault • 1963

The Wretched of the Earth

Colonialism does not just steal land. It colonizes the mind. The clinic is one of its instruments.

Frantz Fanon • 1961

Black Skin, White Masks

The Black man is not. He is made. And the clinic is where that making is most efficiently accomplished.

Frantz Fanon • 1952

The Revolt of the Black Athlete

The institution will allow your excellence only if you remain silent about its violence.

Harry Edwards • 1969

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

The patient is not an empty account to be filled with your expertise. They are a co-creator of knowledge.

Paulo Freire • 1968

Leave Something Behind

Have you encountered a book, essay, or journal that belongs in this room? Share it with the palace. Your recommendation may find its way to the shelves.

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