Our Journey

The Sickle Cell Society is pleased to present the first exhibition about the history of sickle cell anaemia in the UK.

This exhibition will capture this history through the eyes of people and families living with sickle cell, as they tell their stories of illness, action, identity and inheritance. It will bring these oral histories together with photographs, art and archives about the history of sickle cell activism to tell an important story about the fight against health inequality in Britain

Following its discovery in Western medicine, sickle cell was an object of fascination for geneticists and anthropologists as a marker of ‘race’, though it affects people from many backgrounds. Misunderstood by doctors and underfunded for decades, sickle cell became, in the words of Stuart Hall, an ‘emblematically ‘black’ disease’ and a focus of anti-racist campaigning. This exhibition offers a glimpse of how, against the backdrop of British Black Power and the first black MPs in Parliament, patients, nurses and doctors campaigned for equitable treatment in the NHS.