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

Content Warning: The source material and this guide include discussions of racism, eugenics, and medical experimentation.

Washington, the author of Medical Apartheid, is a medical researcher and writer who describes her job as that of being a “medical voyeur” (13). While working on Medical Apartheid, Washington was awarded a Harvard Medical School Fellowship in Medical Ethics, and she has held several other research fellowships throughout her career. Washington includes herself in the text of Medical Apartheid in the Introduction and Epilogue, where she offers personal anecdotes from her life that influenced the book’s writing.

Washington’s interest in medicine’s treatment of African Americans began early in her career when she was working in a teaching hospital in New York. One day, she opened a drawer and discovered two forgotten medical files: one for a white patient and one for a Black patient. Whereas the white patient was described in compassionate terms, the Black patient was described sparingly and with little empathy. While the white patient received a kidney transplant, the Black patient was denied a similarly necessary organ donation. Washington was horrified to realize the disparity in doctors’ approaches towards white and Black patients. The shock motivated her to begin research into the history of the medical abuses of African Americans—a decades-long project that culminated in writing Medical Apartheid.