As Black History Month comes to a close, Iowa State is still providing opportunities for the campus to learn about cultural issues with a lecture about a genetic disorder that affects millions of African Americans.

“Race, Medicine, and the ‘Discovery’ of Sickle Cell Anemia” will be presented by Todd Savitt at 8 p.m. Monday in the Sun Room of the Memorial Union. Savitt is a historian of medicine and professor of history and medical ethics at East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C.

Alan Marcus, professor of history at Iowa State, is hosting Savitt’s lecture. Marcus said he has known Savitt for about 20 years.

Savitt’s primary interest is in African American medical history, and Marcus said this issue ties in well with Black History Month.

“We are very interested in black issues and history,” he said.

Savitt described the medical identification of sickle cell anemia as a “detective story.” He will discuss the who, what, when, where, why and how of sickle cell anemia and describe the first identified cases of this disease from 1910 and 1911.

Marcus said sickle cell anemia is indigenous to Africa. It is a genetic disorder in which infected red blood cells become irregular in shape and are “not as good for carrying oxygen,” Marcus said.

“Not getting circulation to vital organs causes the body to become susceptible to infections,” Savitt said.

Savitt said he hopes people who attend his lecture learn two important things from his presentation.

He wants people to get a “sense of what it takes to do a history of medicine,” as well as understand the “stark differences of the two sickle cell patients of 1910 and 1911.”

Savitt is the author of “Medicine and Slavery: The Diseases and Health Care of Blacks in Antebellum Virginia and Disease and Distinctiveness in the American South.” He has also co-edited three books and published 20-25 articles on many different topics.