The troubling legacy of medical racism is still alive today. A recent study found that people of colour were 29% less likely to get local anaesthesia for minor surgery compared to white patients. In the quest to harness Artificial Intelligence in healthcare, medical racism has crept into the algorithms that shape medical decisions today. Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, traces these deep-seated biases of healthcare systems all the back to the Enlightenment era and race science, but offers hope and a blueprint for eliminating corrupt data moving forward.

Can we trust our hospitals and doctors? Is medicine a neutral science? These are some of the questions that need to be addressed before Artificial Intelligence (AI) is fully integrated into our health-care sector. As I have argued in a new book: the AI algorithms governing our life are prone to the mistakes of the past. Every single aspect of contemporary society, certainly in highly technologized settings such as health care, banking and education, is already affected and increasingly shaped by AI. Unfortunately, a painful history of discrimination and outright racism against minorities is part of that process, including in sciences considered to be “neutral” such as medicine.