In Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination by Alondra Nelson offers a historical and sociopolitical analysis of the development of social health and the rarely discussed health activism and involvement of the Black Panther Party.  Nelson provides a good overview of not just the Panther’s politics but also the long history of African Americans struggling to combat medical discrimination. Nelson utilizes a wide variety of sources to get a clear picture of the party’s health activism, from their newspapers, books and works of party members, organizational propaganda, interviews with old party members, and etc..  Nelson provides a fair overview of the health politic of the Panther party while also critically evaluating the holistic functioning of the party as an organization and their interaction with the community and social institutions in America.  Nelson argues that the politics of the Black Panther Party coupled with their continuation of a long history of Black health activism created the party’s unique “social health” thesis.  Nelson provides an alternative and dialectical analysis of the Black Panther Party, who are commonly remembered as a paramilitary organization.  The Black Panther Party worked as an active critique of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty programs which failed to address the holistic wellbeing of poor Blacks in West Oakland and across the deindustrializing United States.

Nelson’s analysis of the health politics of the party helped reveal that “…health and medicine can be vectors of power, political and otherwise…” (p. x).  Nelson contributes much to the conversation of the African American community’s experiences with the American Medical system.  Nelson adds to the discussion and literature by highlighting the long Black radical tradition of combatting American biomedicalization and racialization from Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. Dubois to the works of the Black Panther Party and their development of free clinics in an attempt to address the holistic bodies and beings of oppressed peoples.  While so much of the work of Paul Starr, Harriet Washington, Dorothy Roberts, Linda Clayton, and W. Michael Byrd reveal the atrocities of the American medical system and the social institution of Western science; Nelson provides a counterpoint to demonstrating how Black organizations and intellectuals combatted and responded to the intersectional oppression of American capitalism.  Nelson reveals how the politics of knowledge of the party were utilized via the works of Frantz Fanon, Che Guevara, and Mao Zedong were utilized to design the party’s socialist and human rights approach to the health of poor Blacks.

A core part of the book was investigating the development of the health politic and how it played out by members of the Black Panther Party, an element that seemed to be missing was more reflections from the women of the party who did so much of the on the ground health clinic work.  This book is a great piece to help reveal the historical, sociopolitical, and political economic elements to modern day human rights perspectives on social health and understandings of health disparities.