Winner of the

National Book Critics Circle Award

for Nonfiction


Medical Apartheid

The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present






PAPERBACK AVAILABLE  January 9, 2008 in bookstores everywhere.ISBN-10: 076791547X; ISBN-13: 978-0767915472 528 p. illus. index. Harlem Moon, $15.95

To order a copy today, please visit
Random House


Publishers Weekly names

Medical Apartheid a Best Book of 2006


Medical Apartheid wins 2007 Nonfiction Award from the

American Library Association Black Caucus

(BCALA)



Medical Apartheid wins

2007 PEN Oakland Award 


Medical Apartheid wins 2007 Gustavus Myers Award 


WELCOME to the  web site for Medical Apartheid! Here, at last, you will find tools  for  educating yourself about  medical research, including how  best to protect yourself while participating in trials that can  improve your health— and the health of other African Americans.



In the future, this site will add features that will  supplement what you learn more from the book about the history and the present of research with African Americans.  It is always under construction, and constructive suggestions are always welcome.

About Medical Apartheid ...

From the era of slavery to the present day, the first full history of black America’s shocking mistreatment as unwilling and unwitting experimental subjects at the hands of the medical establishment.


Medical Apartheid is the first and only comprehensive history of medical experimentation on African Americans. Starting with the earliest encounters between black Americans and Western medical researchers and the racist pseudoscience that resulted, it 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, and the view that they were biologically inferior, oversexed, and unfit for adult responsibilities. 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.


Publishers Weekly praised Washington as “a great storyteller,” and named Medical Apartheid one of the best books of 2006, finding it, “even at its most distressing, compulsively readable.” PW, Kirkus and Booklist each honored the book with starred reviews, and the Black Caucus of the American Library Association bestowed its Honor Nonfiction Award for 2007 on Medical Apartheid, which also won the 2007 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award and a PEN/Oakland award for nonfiction.


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. No one concerned with issues of public health and racial justice can afford not to read Medical Apartheid, a masterful book that will stir up both controversy and long-needed debate.


HARDCOVER published January 9, 2007   Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. 512p. illus. index. Doubleday, $27.95 (0-385-50993-0). In bookstores everywhere.