Join us for a lecture in the Deadly Medicine series: "Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to Present.

American blacks have long suffered from health adversities not shared by whites, and the problem persists even today, decades after the end of state-sanctioned racism. As Harriet A. Washington writes in her new book, Medical Apartheid, the "racial health divide confronts us everywhere we look, from doubled black-infant death rates to African-American life expectancies that fall years behind whites." To the question of how this disparity came to be, she provides a provocative answer.

Though slavery and segregation form the backdrop of her analysis, Washington believes that a very specific aspect of past discrimination against blacks explains the unequal levels of treatment and health that are still with us. Her focus is on the long history of medical experiments of which American blacks were the unwilling or unwitting subjects. These past injuries, Washington argues, have "played a pivotal role in forging the fear of medicine that helps perpetuate our nation's racial health gulf." Long after the events themselves, she believes, the memory of abuse has remained.

(Harriet A. 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 has worked for USA Today and several other publications, been a Knight Fellow at Stanford University and has written for such academic forums as the Harvard Public Health Review and The New England Journal of Medicine. She is the recipient of several prestigious awards for her work.)

Thursday, February 28
7-8:30 PM
SMM Auditorium, Level 3

Presentations at the Science Museum are $12 per person ($8 for Science Museum members). Admission to Deadly Medicine is included in this ticket price. Purchase tickets to four of the lectures and get the fifth one free. For tickets, call (651) 221-9444.

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