Harriet A. Washington

Last updated
Harriet Washington
Harriet Washington 2015.jpg
Washington at the 2015 Texas Book Festival
Born (1951-10-05) October 5, 1951 (age 72) [1]
Fort Dix, New Jersey, U.S.
OccupationAuthor
NationalityAmerican
Education University of Rochester (B.A.)
Columbia University (M.A.)
Notable works Medical Apartheid
Spouse
Ron DeBose
(m. 1992;died 2013)

Harriet A. Washington is an American writer and medical ethicist. She is the author of the book Medical Apartheid , which won the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. [2] She has also written books on environmental racism and the erosion of informed consent in medicine.

Contents

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. [3]

Career

Washington was Health and Science editor of the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle . In 1990, she was awarded the New Horizons Traveling Fellowship by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing. [4] She subsequently worked as a Page One editor at USA Today newspaper, before winning a fellowship from the Harvard School of Public Health. [5] In 1997, she won a John S. Knight Fellowship at Stanford University, and in 2002 was named a research fellow in medical ethics at Harvard Medical School. [6]

In 2007, Washington's third book, Medical Apartheid won the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. [2] The book has been described as "the first and only comprehensive history of medical experimentation on African Americans." [7]

In 2019, she published A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind, which explores how poor people of color disproportionately suffer from environmental disasters and exposure to environmental toxins, including lead, arsenic, mercury, and DDT. [8] [9] [10] Exposure to these chemicals impairs brain development and can lead to lower IQ.

Washington was a visiting scholar at the DePaul University College of Law and was a Shearing Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute of the University of Las Vegas at Nevada in 2012-2013. [11]

Washington has been interviewed by NPR [12] and Democracy Now! . [13]

Selected bibliography

Selected Reviews

Harriet reviews mostly on those subjects that she writes upon - human experimentation, especially deceptive ones, without taking informed consent. She has reviewed for very highly influential, high impact journals. Her review of one of the most talked about books on this subject, namely The Plutonium Files was published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Personal life

Washington was born in Fort Dix, New Jersey. [1] She graduated from the University of Rochester in 1976 with a B.A. in English literature and later completed an M.A. in journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. [5] [1] [14]

Washington lives in Manhattan. [5] She was married to Ron DeBose from 1992 until his death in 2013. [15] [1]

Related Research Articles

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Environmental racism, ecological racism, or ecological apartheid is a form of institutional racism leading to landfills, incinerators, and hazardous waste disposal being disproportionately placed in communities of color. Internationally, it is also associated with extractivism, which places the environmental burdens of mining, oil extraction, and industrial agriculture upon indigenous peoples and poorer nations largely inhabited by people of color.

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Adolescent medicine, also known as adolescent and young adult medicine, is a medical subspecialty that focuses on care of patients who are in the adolescent period of development. This period begins at puberty and lasts until growth has stopped, at which time adulthood begins. Typically, patients in this age range will be in the last years of middle school up until college graduation. In developed nations, the psychosocial period of adolescence is extended both by an earlier start, as the onset of puberty begins earlier, and a later end, as patients require more years of education or training before they reach economic independence from their parents.

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<i>Medical Apartheid</i> 2007 nonfiction book by Harriet A. Washington

Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present is a 2007 book by Harriet A. Washington. It is a history of medical experimentation on African Americans. From the era of slavery to the present day, this book presents the first detailed account of black Americans' abuse as unwitting subjects of medical experimentation.

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References

  1. 1 2 3 4 "Washington, Harriet A." Encyclopedia.com. Retrieved 2018-07-30.
  2. 1 2 "National Book Critics Circle: NBCC Award Winners 2007". Critical Mass Blog. Archived from the original on October 31, 2010. Retrieved 2018-07-30.
  3. Medical Apartheid
  4. "New Horizons Traveling Fellowship Recipients". Council for the Advancement of Science Writing. Retrieved 2018-07-30.
  5. 1 2 3 "Rochester Review". University of Rochester. Summer 2005. Retrieved 2018-07-30.
  6. "Harriet A. Washington (Keynote)". The Center for Translational and Basic Research. Retrieved 2018-07-31.
  7. "Summary and reviews of Medical Apartheid by Harriet A. Washington". BookBrowse. Retrieved 2018-07-30.
  8. Begley, Sarah (2020-07-07). "Health Care Is Racist. Here's What Needs to Change". Medium. Retrieved 2020-07-29.
  9. "Book: 'A Terrible Thing To Waste'". NPR.org. Retrieved 2020-07-29.
  10. "Harriet A. Washington's A Terrible Thing to Waste Injects a Dose of Hard Truth Into the Conversation About Black Lives". The Root. 20 September 2019. Retrieved 2020-07-29.
  11. "Harriet A. Washington". HuffPost. Retrieved 2018-07-30.
  12. "The Ethics Of Coronavirus Vaccine Trials In Developing Countries". NPR.org. Retrieved 2020-07-29.
  13. "Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present". Democracy Now!. Retrieved 2020-07-29.
  14. "Harriet Washington | Penguin Random House".
  15. "Ronnie DeBose Obituary (2013) Rochester Democrat and Chronicle".