UAMS to Host Winthrop Rockefeller Distinguished Lecture, ‘Medical Apartheid … and Beyond’ on Sept. 25
| LITTLE ROCK — The University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) will host the next Winthrop Rockefeller Distinguished Lecture at noon, Wednesday, Sept. 25, featuring author Harriet Washington. The lecture is open to the public.
Washington will deliver the lecture, “Medical Apartheid … and Beyond,” in the Fred Smith Auditorium on the 12th floor of the Jackson T. Stephens Spine & Neurosciences Institute on the Little Rock campus.
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,” the first social history of medical research with African Americans. It was chosen as one of Publishers’ Weekly Best Books of 2006. The book also won the National Book Critics Circle Nonfiction Award, a PEN award, 2007 Gustavus Myers Award, and Nonfiction Award of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association.
More recently Washington has published “Carte Blanche: The Erosion of Informed Consent in Medical Research” and “A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind.” She was the 2015-2016 Miriam Shearing Fellow at the University of Nevada’s Black Mountain Institute, 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, and teaches bioethics at Columbia University, where 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.
Her work provided the basis for the American Medical Association’s apology to the nation’s black physicians in 2008 and led to the banishment of the James Marion Sims statue from Central Park in 2018.
The Winthrop Rockefeller Distinguished Lectures were established in 1972 by friends of former Arkansas Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller. The endowment that funds the lecture program allows six universities in the University of Arkansas system to offer free public lectures that communicate ideas to stimulate public discussion, intellectual debate and cultural advancement.
UAMS is the state’s only health sciences university, with colleges of Medicine, Nursing, Pharmacy, Health Professions and Public Health; a graduate school; a hospital; a main campus in Little Rock; a Northwest Arkansas regional campus in Fayetteville; a statewide network of regional campuses; and eight institutes: the Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute, Jackson T. Stephens Spine & Neurosciences Institute, Harvey & Bernice Jones Eye Institute, Psychiatric Research Institute, Donald W. Reynolds Institute on Aging, Translational Research Institute, Institute for Digital Health & Innovation and the Institute for Community Health Innovation. UAMS includes UAMS Health, a statewide health system that encompasses all of UAMS’ clinical enterprise. UAMS is the only adult Level 1 trauma center in the state. UAMS has 3,485 students, 915 medical residents and fellows, and seven dental residents. It is the state’s largest public employer with more than 11,000 employees, including 1,200 physicians who provide care to patients at UAMS, its regional campuses, Arkansas Children’s, the VA Medical Center and Baptist Health. Visit www.uams.edu or uamshealth.com. Find us on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), YouTube or Instagram.###