Harriet Washington Presents Grand Rounds on December 9th

Harriet Washington Presents Grand Rounds on December 9th

New York, NY (December 7, 2016) – Harriet Washington will present the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health’s December Grand Rounds. Her presentation, entitled “Medical Apartheid and the Persistence of Ethical Memory,” will identify three historical research abuses that persist to some extent in contemporary US practice, discuss two inadequacies of the “judging our forebears” defense of unethical research practices, identify and discuss three ways in which nonconsensual research violates ethical precepts, and finally list three ways in which semantics affects informed consent in medical research.

Harriet Washington is an award-winning medical writer and editor, and the author of the best-selling book, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. She is a science writer, editor and ethicist who has been a Research Fellow in Medical Ethics at Harvard Medical School, Visiting Fellow at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, a visiting scholar at DePaul University College of Law and a senior research scholar at the National Center for Bioethics at Tuskegee University. She has also held fellowships at Stanford University, holds a degree in English from the University of Rochester and an MA in journalism from Columbia University, and in 2016 was elected a Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine.

Ms. Washington has written widely for popular general and science publications and has also been published in refereed books and journals such as JAMA, The American Journal of Public Health, Nature, The New England Journal of Medicine, the Harvard Public Health Review and The Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics. She has been Editor of the Harvard Journal of Minority Public Health and is a guest Editor of the current issue of the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics.  Her other books include Deadly Monopolies: The Shocking Corporate Takeover of Life Itself—and the Consequences for Your Health and Infectious Madness: The Surprising Science of How We “Catch” Mental Illness.  Ms. Washington’s immense knowledge of ethical issues in research, her narrative on the historical impact nonconsensual research has had on minorities in the US, and her perception on how a single individual can have an impact on the system will serve to build on all medical professional’s foundation that guides them in providing equitable and empathetic care to everyone.

As part of the Mount Sinai Health System’s virtual campus, videoconferencing will be offered with the Beth Israel Medical Center’s Department of Family Medicine and the Mount Sinai-affiliated Mid-Hudson Family Medicine Residency in Kingston, NY.

The event will be held from 8-9am on Friday, December 9th in Mount Sinai’s Goldwurm Auditorium in the Icahn building (1425 Madison Avenue), 1st Floor. A light breakfast will be served at 7:30am.

Grand Rounds are open to all and occur on the second Friday of every month, September-June.