**NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER - The first full history
of Black America's shocking mistreatment as unwilling and unwitting
experimental subjects at the hands of the medical establishment. No one
concerned with issues of public health and racial justice can afford not
to read this masterful book.
**
"[Washington] has unearthed a shocking amount of information and
shaped it into a riveting, carefully documented book." --New York
Times
From the era of slavery to the present day, starting with the earliest
encounters between Black Americans and Western medical researchers and
the racist pseudoscience that resulted, Medical Apartheid 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 was used to justify experimental exploitation and shoddy
medical treatment of Blacks. Shocking new details about the government's
notorious Tuskegee experiment are revealed, as are similar,
less-well-known medical atrocities conducted by the government, the
armed forces, prisons, and private institutions.
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. At last, it provides the fullest possible context for
comprehending the behavioral fallout that has caused Black Americans to
view researchers--and indeed the whole medical establishment--with such
deep distrust.
