Carte Blanche: The Erosion of Medical Consent

by Harriet A. Washington

Overview

“Urgent, alarming, riveting, and essential.” —Ibram X. Kendi

Carte Blanche is the alarming tale of how the right of Americans to say “no” to risky medical research is being violated. Patients' right to give or withhold consent is supposed to be protected by law, but for decades medical research has been conducted on trauma victims—who are disproportionately people of color—without their consent or even their knowledge.

Harriet A. Washington, the author of Medical Apartheid, is again exposing a large-scale violation of patient, civil, and human rights. She reveals that the abuse first began in the military: In 1990, the Department of Defense forced an experimental anthrax vaccine on ground troops headed for the Persian Gulf. After a 1996 loophole to federal law permitted research to be conducted even on private citizens, particularly trauma patients, the military has pressed ahead to impose nonconsensual testing of the dangerous and sometimes lethal blood substitute PolyHeme among civilians, quietly using it on more than 20,000 non-consenting victims. Since then, more than a dozen studies have used the 1996 loophole to give risky and potentially deadly drugs to patients without their knowledge, especially people of color, many of whom were already justifiably distrustful of racial bias in medicine. Carte Blanche is an exposé of a U.S. medical-research system that has proven again and again that it cannot be trusted.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781734420722
Publisher:	Columbia Global Reports
Publication date:	02/23/2021
Pages:	150
Sales rank:	516,232
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.40(h) x 0.60(d)

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 receipient of a John S. Knight Fellowship at Stanford University. She lectures in bioethics at Columbia Universityand is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. Her books also include A Terrible Thing to Waste and Infectious Madness.

Editorial Reviews

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

“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, author of The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress

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

“Medical ethicist and journalist Washington offers considerable evidence of deceptive and devious practices in medical research, which especially impact Black Americans.... An enlightening and well-supported examination of shocking malfeasance.” —Kirkus Reviews

“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, MD, MS, Professor and Chief of Staff of the Department of Neurology at the Columbia UniversityVagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons

From the Publisher

2020-12-09
An alarming indictment of exploitative medical research.

Medical ethicist and journalist Washington offers considerable evidence of deceptive and devious practices in medical research, which especially impact Black Americans. After World War II, she notes, in response to “forcible human experimentation” inflicted upon prisoners and concentration camp victims, “the Nuremberg Code was imposed to ban research without voluntary consent. Informed consent was enshrined into U.S. law in 1947 to ensure that research would never be imposed on Americans without their knowledge or consent.” However, researchers have found ways to undermine that law, leading to the continuation of nonconsensual experimental abuse. Reprising evidence that she presented in Medical Apartheid(2007), Washington underscores her argument that African Americans historically have been victimized by researchers. “Whether subjected to laissez-faire experimentation on the plantation, early clinics, or other institutions, black Americans were sold to doctors expressly for nineteenth-century research and physician-training purposes,” she writes. This included the testing of reproductive surgical procedures on Black women “because unlike white women, they could not say no.” The infamous Tuskegee syphilis study, which ran from 1932 to 1972, withheld treatment for 600 Black men diagnosed with syphilis, instead maintaining them in an infected state so they could be “tracked, studied, and ultimately autopsied.” In 2010, researchers “intentionally induced hypothermia in unwitting black men who suffered gunshot wounds.” Prisoners and soldiers have repeatedly become research subjects without their consent, but Washington asserts that nonconsensual research—for profit—is becoming more normalized, risking the well-being of all Americans. She advocates clear disclosures to allow the average patient to agree to become an informed participant, including “possible lifestyle effects” of a given study. A patient who refuses or is deemed incapable of consent “should be considered ineligible for research and simply treated with the best known care, as if there were no research study to worry about.”

An enlightening and well-supported examination of shocking malfeasance.

Kirkus Reviews