Harriet A. Washington

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.

Washington was born in Fort Dix, New Jersey. She is a graduate of the University of Rochester and Columbia University.

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. She subsequently worked as a Page One editor at USA Today newspaper, before winning a fellowship from the Harvard School of Public Health. 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.

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

Washington was a Visiting Scholar at the DePaul University College of Law and is now a Bennett Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute of the University of Las Vegas at Nevada.

Washington has been interviewed by NPR and Democracy Now!.

Selected bibliography

• Living Healthy with Hepatitis C: Natural and Conventional Approaches to Recover your Quality of Life. New York: Dell. 2000. ISBN 978-0-440-23608-5.
• "Burning Love: Big Tobacco Takes Aim at LGBT Youths". American Journal of Public Health. 92 (7): 1086–1095. July 2002. doi:10.2105/ajph.92.7.1086.
• Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. New York: Doubleday. 2006. ISBN 978-0-385-50993-0.
• Deadly Monopolies: The Shocking Corporate Takeover of Life Itself--And the Consequences for Your Health and Our Medical Future. New York: Random House. 2011. ISBN 978-0-385-52892-4.
• Infectious Madness: The Surprising Science of How we "Catch" Mental Illness. New York: Little, Brown and Company. 2015. ISBN 978-0-316-27780-8.
• A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and its Assault on the American Mind. Little, Brown Spark. 2019. ISBN 978-0-316-50943-5.

Personal life

Washington lives in Manhattan with her husband.