Thackray Insights invites you to delve deep into eye­ opening topics and explore the unheard stories of medicine.

Akosua Paries-Osei discusses how ‘The Virgin Cure’ and other Western notions around sex were racialised when transported to the colonies in the 1700s; reinvented as ‘African’ traditions, these dangerous myths influenced medical policy for 200 years. Rianna Raymond Williams then shares her work on the ‘Unboxing‘ initiative, reclaiming the Black female experience of sexual and reproductive health to influence equitable, justice-based patient care.

About the Speakers:

Akosua Paries-Osei is a historian and doctoral researcher at Royal Holloway, University of London, specialising in the history of science, slavery, gender and ethnobotany. Her research examines African and Caribbean women’s botanical knowledge of reproductive health, interrogating its transmission, appropriation and erasure within colonial scientific and medical knowledge systems and histories.

Rianna Raymond Williams is a researcher, strategist and creative practitioner specialising in health equity, sexual and reproductive health, and social justice. Her doctoral research examines how Black Caribbean women experience and navigate sexual and reproductive healthcare in the UK, drawing on Black feminist thought, reproductive justice and lived experience to interrogate radicalised health inequalities.

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