Harriet A. Washington facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Harriet Washington
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Washington at the 2015 Texas Book Festival
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| Born | October 5, 1951 Fort Dix, New Jersey, U.S. |
| Occupation | Author |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | University of Rochester (B.A.) Columbia University (M.A.) |
| Notable works | Medical Apartheid |
| Spouse |
Ron DeBose
(m. 1992; died 2013) |
Harriet A. Washington is an American writer and expert in medical ethics. She writes important books about health, fairness, and how medicine affects people. Her most famous book, Medical Apartheid, won a big award called the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2007. She also writes about how pollution unfairly affects certain communities, a topic known as environmental racism.
Washington has been a special researcher at places like Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. She was also a senior scholar at the National Center for Bioethics at Tuskegee University.
Contents
Harriet Washington's Career and Books
Harriet Washington started her career as a Health and Science editor for the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle newspaper. In 1990, she received a special award called the New Horizons Traveling Fellowship. After that, she worked as an editor at USA Today newspaper.
She then earned a fellowship from the Harvard School of Public Health. In 1997, she won a John S. Knight Fellowship at Stanford University. Later, in 2002, she became a research fellow in medical ethics at Harvard Medical School.
Her Important Books
In 2007, Washington's book, Medical Apartheid, won the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. This book is very important because it tells the full story of how medical experiments were done on African Americans throughout history. It was the first book to cover this topic so completely.
In 2019, she published another important book called A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind. This book looks at how poor people and people of color are often hurt more by environmental problems. They might be exposed to harmful chemicals like lead, arsenic, mercury, and DDT. Being exposed to these chemicals can harm brain development and even lower a person's IQ.
Other Work and Interviews
Washington has also been a visiting scholar at the DePaul University College of Law. She was also a Shearing Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute of the University of Las Vegas at Nevada.
Her work is so important that she has been interviewed by major news programs like NPR and Democracy Now!.
About Harriet Washington's Life
Harriet Washington was born in Fort Dix, New Jersey. She went to the University of Rochester and earned a bachelor's degree in English literature in 1976. Later, she earned a master's degree in journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Today, Washington lives in Manhattan. She was married to Ron DeBose from 1992.
