YOU PROMISED TO DO NO HARM (A True Story of Love, Loss, and the Horror of Healthcare Disparity for One African-American Family) by Jonnie Ramsey Brown is a beautiful, terrible book; everyone who cares a jot about the institutional racism ingrained in the American health care system should read it. Author Jonnie Ramsey Brown’s achievement is to take a personal grief—the unexpected death of her husband of almost forty years—and use it to demonstrate, in uncompromising, unimpeachable tones, the way in which health care in the United States is horribly broken.
The first 70 pages or so of the book are a delight. Brown recounts the beginnings of her relationship with Thomas, relating his mannerisms, strength, and loving nature with deep and obvious affection. The pair married at the end of the 1970s and formed a blended family, both with children from previous marriages. Brown, a former air traffic controller, and Thomas, a former Air Force man, moved up in the world, gaining graduate qualifications and bringing up a boy who would become a two-time Olympic gold medalist in the likes of sprinter Michael Marsh.
But in 2017, during a family union away from home, Thomas fell ill and was taken to a local hospital that, as one nurse apologetically put it, “just doesn’t care about Black people.” Brown was forced to watch as her husband slowly bled to death, neglected and exposed to a general callousness and lack of care.
The entire second half of the book—around 170 pages—is devoted to a highly detailed, unsparing account of the civil lawsuit Brown brought against the Florida hospital that was responsible for Thomas’s care. With a highly competent lawyer, Brown listened as the lawyer for the defense pulled every piece of sleight-of-hand conceivable to beat the case. The six-person jury were unable to agree, two of the jurors refusing to admit the possibility of inadequate care for reasons they were unwilling to disclose, and a mistrial was called. Eventually, an out-of-court settlement was agreed upon.
What emerges from this narrative is Brown’s righteous contempt for the systemic racism that continues to underpin American society. The more egregious examples of neglect shown by various health professionals jostle for space alongside the innumerable microaggressions both Thomas and Brown were forced to endure, such as Brown’s (as it turned out, entirely legitimate) concern at being labeled according to the racist stereotype of the angry Black woman—both by waspish hospital staff and, more obliquely, by hostile defense lawyers.
Jonnie Ramsey Brown’s YOU PROMISED TO DO NO HARM (A True Story of Love, Loss, and the Horror of Healthcare Disparity for One African-American Family) is no corrective to any of this. Rather, it fulfills the crucial job of bearing witness to an unforgivable failure.
~Craig Jones for IndieReader