Upcoming Lecture: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans

NEW YORK - January 11, 2007 - Early encounters between black Americans and medical researchers often resulted in a racist pseudoscience that found both slaves and freedmen being used in hospitals for experiments conducted without their knowledge.

Harriet Washington, Visiting Scholar at DePaul University College of Law in Chicago will discuss the dark history surrounding medical experimentation on African Americans in a lecture on Thursday, January 25, at 6:00 p.m. at The New York Academy of Medicine.

The lecture will focus on research from Washington's newly published book, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. She will discuss a variety of case studies, including the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments, in which the U.S. Public Health Service for forty years conducted an experiment on 399 black men with late-stage syphilis. These men, for the most part illiterate sharecroppers from Alabama, were never told they had syphilis nor were they treated for it. Doctors were most interested in autopsying the men after they died in order to discover how syphilis affected their body as opposed to whites'. The men were told they were being treated for "bad blood," and received free medical exams meals and burial insurance for participating in the study. In her lecture, Washington will present arguments about black Americans??? distrust of the medical establishment, in part borne of such experimentation, and the implications of their lack of trust. Medical Apartheid explores African American medical experimentation more comprehensively than any previous scholarly work.

Harriet 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 worked for USA Today and several other publications, was a Knight Fellow at Stanford University, and has written for the Harvard Public Health Review and The New England Journal of Medicine.

Sponsored by the Academy's Section on the History of Medicine and Public Health, this lecture is free and open to the public. The lecture begins at 6 p.m. at the Academy, at 1216 Fifth Ave. (at 103rd Street) and is preceded by refreshments at 5:30 p.m. Autographed copies of Washington's book will be available for purchase at the event.

Other upcoming lectures:

Thursday, February 15, 2007 Chris Feudtner, "Depicting Decisions: The History of Diabetes and the Daily Work of Care"

Wednesday, March 21, 2007 Annual Friends of the Rare Book Room Lecture Walton Schalick, "School Books, School Days: The Technology of Medical Books in Medieval Paris"

Thursday, April 26, 2007 The Iago Galdston Lecture Susan Lederer, "Bombs, Blood, and Bio-Markers: Medical Preparedness in Cold-War America."

Tuesday, May 22, 2007 Gerry Oppenheimer, "Shattered Dreams?" The Impact of AIDS on the New South Africa

Founded in 1847, The New York Academy of Medicine is an independent, non-partisan, non-profit institution whose mission is to enhance the health of the public. The Academy is a leading center for urban health policy and action working to enhance the health of people living in cities worldwide through research, education, advocacy, and prevention. Visit us online at www.nyam.org.

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Posted on January 11, 2007

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Contact:
Andrew J. Martin
Director of Communications
The New York Academy of Medicine
1216 Fifth Avenue
New York, New York 10029
212-822-7285
amartin@nyam.org

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