Carte Blanche

Name: Carte Blanche
Price: 15.99 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Harriet A. Washington

The Erosion of Medical Consent

By Harriet A. Washington

The shocking and heretofore unknown story about the severe erosion of informed consent over the past twenty-five years. Through a combination of investigative reporting and moral passion, distinguished medical journalist Harriet A. Washington alerts the country to a terrible problem we haven’t realized we had.

$15.99

ISBN: 9781734420722
ebook ISBN: 9781734420739
On Sale: February 23, 2021
Pages: 184

Available from:

Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Bookshop

Overview

Carte Blanche relates an alarming reality-how the right of Americans to say “no” to risky medical research is being systematically eroded. For decades, medical research has been legally conducted on trauma victims-who often are people of color-without their consent, or even their knowledge.

Harriet A. Washington, the author of Medical Apartheid, again exposes a large-scale violation of patient, civil, and human rights. In 1990, the Department of Defense forced an experimental anthrax vaccine on ground troops headed for the Persian Gulf. After two 1996 loopholes to federal law permitted research to be conducted even on private citizens, the military quietly used the dangerous blood substitute PolyHeme on non-consenting victims. Since then, more than a dozen studies have used the consent loopholes to impose risky and potentially deadly drugs and devices on research subjects without their knowledge, especially in people of color, many of whom were already justifiably distrustful of documented racial bias in medicine.

Carte Blanche is an exposé of a U.S. medical-research system that has repeatedly shown that it is untrustworthy.

This book is published with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

Read CGR Director Nicholas Lemann’s Letter to the Reader

Praise

“A tight and informative historical overview of the ways informed consent has been evaded.” Washington Post

“Urgent, alarming, riveting, and essential, Carte Blanche reveals that Americans, including African Americans, are still being medically experimented upon without their consent-yet again in research sanctioned by law. Harriet Washington’s powerful indictment of ongoing medical coercion unveils a gross violation of our human rights. It is vital reading at a moment when change is so necessary.” Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist and Stamped From the Beginning

“An alarming indictment of exploitative medical research.... An enlightening and well-supported examination of shocking malfeasance.” Kirkus Reviews

“Harriet Washington’s new book Carte Blanche, about unsanctioned medical experimentation on Americans, is the most unsettling and alarming work I’ve read in a long time. This issue is not a relic of history. It’s a problem RIGHT NOW. This is required reading to understand the context of this pandemic.” Jelani Cobb, Ira A. Lipman Professor of Journalism, Columbia University

“I want to thank Harriet Washington for her wonderful book. As a physician it was really engaging reading for so many reasons. It encompasses all the human conflicts and challenges we face when working in a fundamentally unjust system.” Olajide A. Williams, Chief of Staff and Professor of Neurology, Columbia University

View More Praise

Coverage

8 Books About the History of Eugenics in the United States Book Riot

Experimental Overreach: Why Doctors and Researchers Must ask for Consent American Scholar

The Lethal Legacy of Unethical Medical Research Midday on WNYC

How The Medical Research System Gets Around Informed Consent KERA Think

Vaccines, Black Americans, and Medical Consent WhoWhatWhy podcast

Harriet Washington on the Illusion of Medical Consent Make It Plain with Rev. Mark Thompson podcast

Harriet A. Washington on the Narrative Around Vaccine Hesitancy in the African American Community Keen On podcast

What is “Informed Consent?” A Q&A with Harriet A. Washington Intima

COVID-19 Chapter 16: Disparities, Take 2 This Podcast Will Kill You

The Erosion of Medical Consent Reclaim the Bench podcast

Informed Consent on a Complicated Path for Patients Emergency Medicine News

Medical Racism Past and Present Epidemic with Dr. Celine Gounder podcast

View More Coverage

No Upcoming Events

View Past Events

About the Author

Harriet A. Washington is the author of Medical Apartheid, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN Oakland Award, and the American Library Association Black Caucus Nonfiction Award. She has been a research fellow in medical ethics at Harvard Medical School, a senior research scholar at the National Center for Bioethics at Tuskegee University, and the recipient of a John S. Knight Fellowship at Stanford University. She lectures in bioethics at Columbia University.