Harriet A. Washington has won many national awards for her writing. Her 2007 book Medical Apartheid  has been a critical and commercial success, winning starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus and Booklist. Publishers’ Weekly named it one of the year’s Best Books and it also won the 2007 nonfiction award from the National Book Critics Circle, the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, a PEN/Oakland Award and the 2007 Gustavus Myers Award. It has been praised in periodicals from the Washington Post and Newsweek to the Times of London and it has been excerpted in New York Academy of Sciences’ Update. Experts have praised its scholarship, accuracy and insights.

A smattering of the critical praise  for Medical Apartheid  is excerpted below.

Publishers Weekly*Boxed, starred review)
This groundbreaking study documents that the infamous Tuskegee experiments, in which black syphilitic men were studied but not treated, was simply the most publicized in a long, and continuing, history of the American medical establishment using African-Americans as unwitting or unwilling human guinea pigs. Washington, a journalist and bioethicist who has worked at Harvard Medical School and Tuskegee University, has accumulated a wealth of documentation, beginning with Thomas Jefferson exposing hundreds of slaves to an untried smallpox vaccine before using it on whites, to the 1990s, when the New York State Psychiatric Institute and Columbia University ran drug experiments on African-American and black Dominican boys to determine a genetic predisposition for "disruptive behavior." Washington is a great storyteller,and in addition to giving us an abundance of information on "scientific racism," the book, even at its most distressing, is compulsively readable. It covers a wide range of topics—the history of hospitals not charging black patients so that, after death, their bodies could be used for anatomy classes; the exhaustive research done on black prisoners throughout the 20th century—and paints a powerful and disturbing portrait of medicine, race, sex and the abuse of power.

Kirkus(* Starred review)

Ethicist and journalist Washington details the abusive medical practices to which
African-Americans have been subjected.She begins her shocking history in the colonial period, when owners would hire out or sell slaves to physicians for use as guinea pigs in medical experiments. Into the 19th century, black cadavers were routinely exploited for profit by whites who shipped them to medical schools for dissection and to museums and traveling shows for casual public display. The most notorious case here may be the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which about 600 syphilitic men were left untreated by the U.S. Public Health Service so it could study the progression of the disease, but Washington asserts that it was the forerunner to a host of similar medical abuses. Among her numerous examples is the radical brain surgery performed by a University of Mississippi neurosurgeon on African-American boys as young as six who were deemed aggressive or hyperactive, a procedure he recommended for urban rioters
after Watts. And the abuses are not all buried in the distant past: During a 1992-1997 study of the biological basis of violent behavior conducted by the New York State Psychiatric Institute and Columbia University’s Loewenstein Center, researchers intimidated parents of black juvenile offenders into permitting them to administer the dangerous drug fenfluramine to the offenders’ younger brothers.

African-Americans’ reproductive rights have been trampled on; soldiers, prisoners and children have been coerced into becoming subjects of experiments without therapeutic value to themselves; the federal government and private companies have utilized unwitting blacks in large-scale experiments with radiation and biological weapons, she asserts. While the worst abuses have
been eliminated, Washington concludes, African-American skepticism about the medical establishment and reluctance to participate in medical research is an unfortunate result. One of her goals in writing this book, aside from documenting a shameful past, is to convince them that they must participate actively in therapeutic medical research, especially in areas that most affect their community’s health, while remaining ever alert to possible abuses.
Sweeping and powerful.

Booklist (* Starred review)
The shameful history of the physical and medical misuse of African Americans began
long before the infamous Tuskegee experiment of the 1930s. Washington, a medical
journalist, offers the first and only comprehensive history of medical experimentation on and mistreatment of black Americans. ...Washington draws on medical journals and previously unpublished reports that openly acknowledged racial attitudes and
experimentation, protected by the fact that the public and the media rarely read or
understood such reports and often shared similar feelings on the subject. Washington also details a litany of medical abuses and experimentation aimed at black men in the military and in prison, as well as women and children, all without proper notification or consent.
This is a stunning work, broad in scope and well documented, revealing a history that
reverberates in African Americans’ continued distrust of the medical profession. —
—Vanessa Bush

 
" In an excerpt from her harrowing new book, Medical Apartheid, a journalist/ethicist traces the dark history of medical experimentation on black Americans from colonial times to the present."

Rich Kelley,   New York Academy of Sciences Update Magazine (January/February 2007)

"This is an important book. The disgraceful history it details is a reminder that people in power have always been capable of exploiting those they regard ‘other’..."

This book is fascinating and compelling. Some readers might find Washington’s
auctorial attachment to her topic of research too passionate but there is no denying
that her empathy stems from both human compassion and scholarly principles. The
book’s analysis challenges the reader to question established paradigms in the history
of medicine. To this end, Washington has written a volume of interest not only to
those engaged in the history of human experiments but also for those interested in
medical ethics and morality.

“A fresh account of the Tuskegee study, including new information about the internal
politics of the panel charged by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare with  investigating it in 1972, lies at the center of Harriet A. Washington's courageous and poignant book. … Washington also sheds light on how our understanding of what constitutes medical research requires broadening in the face of new developments in genetic science.”

Washington, a journalist with a strong background in medical ethics,
presents a thorough and compelling case and an encyclopedic historical
catalogue of medical mistreatment, ethical lapses, misguided and harmful
research, eugenic abominations, lethal experiments, discrimination,
and neglect of essential medical needs.  She marshals an impressive
array of evidence, and  … This landmark book is essential
reading for all who work in medical, public health, and related professions
and settings …Medical Apartheid helps to shine a light of clarity and understanding into the dark shadows and recesses that have obscured our ability to grasp our
past and to chart a socially and medically just future.

"[A]n important book. Intellectually, I am pleased that I read it. Emotionally, I cannot drive the ugliness of its findings from
my mind."

"Big names and big subjects tend to generate big publicity around publication time, but it takes an additional, often indefinable something for a book to continue selling."

Through scholarship and tenacity, Washington has produced a work that
shows Blacks had reason to lose faith in American medicine long before Tuskegee and have reason to be wary even today. She also explains why repairing this breach of trust is crucial to closing the healthcare gap that plagues people of color in this country. … While Washington sometimes comes close to looking too hard to find racism, in the end she shows balance in assessing modern research. She does not slip over into paranoia. And, most importantly, she makes a strong case for why, despite the history of horrendous mistreatment of Blacks by researchers, it is important that African Americans be represented in clinical trials aimed at
achieving medical advances, including some targeting ailments that disproportionately affect Blacks. … Medical Apartheid is a powerful record and manual that will help us open our eyes.

As she weaves history, science and culture, Washington takes complex information and makes it reader-friendly. Her text traces the
abuse, examines the pseudoscience used to exploit prisoners and black women and outlays how race and technology prey on black
Americans today. Her writing so pinpoint, she brings literary drama to describing how diseases vex the human body. Her narratives so crisp, she brings to wrenching life the abuse of blacks by the establishment.

“Far from merely cataloging horrors, Washington, a journalist and former fellow in ethics at Harvard Medical School, also illustrates what she calls the “dual face” of these abuses, pointing out that the exploitation of black subjects made numerous medical advances possible. … Washington’s book is a rallying call for change within the medical and African American communities.”

"Harriet Washington’s investigation, along with evidence of persisting unethical practices down the years, stresses the need for renewed vigilance, especially where trials are conducted among poor and underprivileged people."

In this fascinating book, medical ethicist and journalist Harriet A. Washington documents how slaves and freedmen were used for experiments in hospitals, often without their knowledge and consent. It's a practice Washington says continues today. Not for the fainthearted, Medical Apartheid details grave robbing, autopsies and dissections, but in doing so, it unearths a disturbing history and is an important piece of investigative journalism.

A fresh account of the Tuskegee study, including new information about the internal politics of the panel charged by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare with investigating it in 1972, lies at the center of Harriet A. Washington's courageous and poignant book. The balance of Medical Apartheid reveals, with arresting detail, that this scandal was neither the first chapter nor the last in the exploitation of black subjects in U.S. medical research.

As an ethicist and civil rights proponent, I found Medical Apartheid a shocking revelation of the extent that African Americans have truly suffered at the hands of the medical profession. While I was aware of some of the most publicised cases, I was appalled to learn of the many, many incidents where the medical profession did harm to their patients. The oft-cited credo of Hippocrates, "Do no harm," has repeatedly been violated. Must reading for all health professionals.

“The title says it all. ‘Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present’ is an eye-opening journey that meticulously documents the "scientific racism" associated with medical treatment of black Americans.

Ms. Washington, a Harvard and Tuskegee-trained scholar in ethics and journalism, conducted exhaustive research in order to be able to shed light on the country’s racism in the name of scientific research.

"[A] comprehensive account of the exploitation of black Americans in medical education and research. ..."

 
Given the penchant for most Americans to sweep issues of race under the rug, this book has become a surprising top seller —and deservedly so.

Order a copy of Medical Apartheid today