Thank you for joining Say Ah!’s On Equity and Health Literacy with renowned ethicist and writer Harriet A. Washington, held on Wednesday, October 9, 2024, from 3:30–5:00 p.m. ET on Zoom. This was a live event and was not available via recording.
This special installment of Say Ah!’s Racism & Health Literacy Series featured a talk by Ms. Washington, whose unique and courageous voice challenges our belief in established paradigms of health care and asks us to recast our health literacy work in this new light.
Speaker Background
Ms. Washington is a highly acclaimed ethicist and award-winning author whose most recent book, Carte Blanche: The Erosion of Medical Consent, tells the alarming development of how the right of Americans to say “no” to risky medical research is being violated. Her seminal work, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Experimentation from Colonial Times to the Present, won a National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/ Oakland Award, and the American Library Association Black Caucus Nonfiction Award. Her work provided the basis for the AMA’s apology to the nation’s black physicians in 2008 and led to the banishment of the James Marion Sims statue from New York’s Central Park in 2018.
Ms. Washington has been a Writing Fellow in Bioethics at Harvard Medical School and a senior research scholar at the National Center for Bioethics at Tuskegee University. Among her many awards, she won the 2020 Mailman School Of Public Health’s Public Health Leadership Award, as well as the 2020-21 Kenneth and Mamie Clark Distinguished Lecture Award. In 2016, she was elected a Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine, and in 2021, the American Medical Writers Association gave her the Walter C. Alvarez Award.