Medical Apartheid, Harriet A. Washington
Medical Apartheid, Harriet A. Washington
3 Rating(s)
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Medical Apartheid
The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

Author: Harriet A. Washington

Narrator: Ron Butler

Unabridged: 19 hr 2 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 03/08/2016

Categories: Nonfiction, History, Medical


Synopsis

Medical Apartheid is the first and only comprehensive history of medical experimentation on African Americans. Starting with the earliest encounters between black Americans and Western medical researchers and the racist pseudoscience that resulted, it details the ways both slaves and freedmen were used in hospitals for experiments conducted without their knowledge—a tradition that continues today within some black populations. It reveals how blacks have historically been prey to grave-robbing as well as unauthorized autopsies and dissections. Moving into the twentieth century, it shows how the pseudoscience of eugenics and social Darwinism were used to justify experimental exploitation and shoddy medical treatment of blacks.

The product of years of prodigious research into medical journals and experimental reports long undisturbed, Medical Apartheid reveals the hidden underbelly of scientific research and makes possible, for the first time, an understanding of the roots of the African American health deficit.

About Harriet A. Washington

Harriet A. Washington has been a fellow in ethics at the Harvard Medical School, a fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health, and a senior research scholar at the National Center for Bioethics at Tuskegee University. As a journalist and editor, she has worked for USA Today and several other publications, has been a Knight Fellow at Stanford University, and has written for such academic forums as the Harvard Public Health Review and the New England Journal of Medicine. She lives in New York City.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Bill on August 23, 2008

This book is incredibly hard to read in that it's so harrowing sometimes your stomach just turns as you turn the pages. However, it is masterfully written, immensely researched, and should be mandatory reading for, probably, the entire planet.......more

Goodreads review by Christina on May 03, 2010

This. Book. Is. Explosive. I found this book about a year ago in the huge Barnes and Noble in Union Square. It was somewhere on the bottom shelf in the African American section. The fact that I, even if accidentally, came across this book shows my dedication to finding a good book. The title is stri......more

Goodreads review by Thomas on October 29, 2021

A powerful and long book about the history of anti-Black racism within science and medicine, mostly focused on the United States. Harriet Washington writes about atrocities spanning the period of slavery, the Tuskegee experiment, the forced sterilization of Black women, the mistreatment of incarcera......more

Goodreads review by Nathan on February 02, 2024

One of the best history books I’ve ever read......more

Goodreads review by Laura on August 17, 2011

Washington is a former ethics fellow at Harvard Medical School. She catalogs a shameful, centuries long tradition in American medicine of using African Americans in medical experiments. I knew vaguely that had happened, and happened in living memory, but she provides details. Gory, gory details. I’m......more