Research!Louisville Special Guest Speaker: A Conversation with Author Harriet Washington

The University of Louisville Office of Institutional Equity and HSC Office of Diversity and Inclusion cordially welcomes you to hear from Harriet Washington, author of several books, including the award-winning "Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present." This Research!Louisville event will be held at the University of Louisville Health Sciences Center in Kornhauser Library, HSC Auditorium. The program will be facilitated by Kiana Fields, HSC Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

Light snacks and refreshments will be served on a first come first served basis.

Books will be sold by Carmichael's Bookstore at the event. Ms. Washington will be available to sign books after the program.

There is a virtual option. Virtual login details will only be sent to registered attendees.

This is a FREE event. Register below to attend. [Download Flyer]

About Harriet Washington

As a medical ethicist, Harriet Washington has a unique and courageous voice and deconstructs the politics around medical issues. In addition to giving an abundance of historically accurate information on ‘scientific racism’, she paints a powerful and disturbing portrait of medicine, race, sex, and the abuse of power by telling individual human stories. Washington also makes the case for broader political consciousness of science and technology, challenging audiences to see the world differently and challenge established paradigms in the history of medicine.

Her latest book, Carte Blanche: The Erosion of Medical Consent , is the alarming tale of how the right of Americans to say “no” to risky medical research is being violated. Patients' right to give or withhold consent is supposed to be protected by law, but for decades medical research has been conducted on trauma victims ― who are disproportionately people of color ― without their consent or even their knowledge.

Harriet A. Washington is a science writer, editor and ethicist who is the author of Carte Blanche: The Erosion of Informed Consent in Medical Research (2021, Columbia Global Reports); and A Terrible Thing to Waste:nEnvironmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind. She has been Writing Fellow in Bioethics at Harvard Medical School, the 2015-2016 Miriam Shearing Fellow at the University of Nevada's Black Mountain Institute, a Research Fellow in Medical Ethics at Harvard Medical School, Visiting Fellow at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, a visiting scholar at DePaul University College of Law and a senior research scholar at the National Center for Bioethics at Tuskegee University. She has also held fellowships at Stanford University, and teaches bioethics at Columbia University, where she delivered the 2020 commencement speech to Columbia’s School of Public Health graduates, and won the 2020 Mailman School Of Public Health’s Public Health Leadership Award, as well as the 2020-21 Kenneth and Mamie Clark Distinguished Lecture Award. In 2016, she was elected a Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine, and in 2021, the American Medical Writers Association gave her the Walter C. Alvarez Award.

Her work provided the basis for the AMA’s apology to the nation’s black physicians in 2008 and led to the banishment of the James Marion Sims statue from Central Park in 2018.

Ms. Washington has written widely for popular magazines, newspapers, and science publications and has been published in peer-reviewed books and journals such as Nature, JAMA, The American Journal of Public Health, The New England Journal of Medicine , the Harvard Public Health Review, Isis, Medizin und Ethik in der Pandemie APuZ and The Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics. She has been Editor of the Harvard Journal of Minority Public Health, a guest Editor of the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics and is a reviewer for the Journal of the American Association of Bioethics and the Humanities . Her other books include Infectious Madness: The Surprising Science of How We "Catch" Mental Illness , Deadly Monopolies: The Shocking Corporate Takeover of Life Itself, and Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Experimentation from Colonial Times to the Present, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/ Oakland Award, and the American Library Association Black Caucus Nonfiction Award.

A film buff and lover of baroque music, Ms. Washington has also worked as manager of a poison-control center, a classical-music announcer for public radio station WXXI- FM in Rochester, NY and she curates a medical- film series.