Vanessa Northington Gamble
Vanessa Northington Gamble is a physician who chaired the Tuskegee Syphilis Study Legacy Committee in 1997.Early life and education
Born in West Philadelphia, Gamble was primarily raised by her maternal grandmother. She attended Philadelphia High School for Girls and graduated in 1970, then studied medical sociology and biology at Hampshire College, graduating with her bachelor's degree in 1974. Gamble then attended medical school and graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, earning her M.D. in 1983 and her Ph.D. in the history and sociology of science in 1987. She completed her graduate medical education at the University of Massachusetts.Career
Gamble began her career with appointments at the Harvard School of Public Health, Hampshire College, and the University of Massachusetts. In 1989, she was appointed an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin, where she taught courses on the intersection of race and public health in the United States. At the University of Wisconsin Medical School, she founded and was director of its Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, an unethical, racist study of long-term syphilis infection in black men, was investigated in 1997 by a committee chaired by Gamble. This committee pushed then-President Bill Clinton to issue a formal apology on behalf of the government. She left the University of Wisconsin in 2000, and moved to Tuskegee University, where she led the first National Bioethics Center to be established at a historically black university. Beginning in 2003, Gamble was a professor at Johns Hopkins University in the school of public health. As of 2016, she is a professor of medical humanities at George Washington University, where she began teaching in 2007.
Gamble has also worked with research organizations, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institute of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, and the American Foundation for AIDS Research.Publications
- "Standardizing return of participant results"
- "Outstanding Services to Negro Health": Dr. Dorothy Boulding Ferebee, Dr. Virginia M. Alexander, and Black Women Physicians' Public Health Activism.
- "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks reconsidered."
- "No struggle, no fight, no court battle": the 1948 desegregation of the University of Arkansas School of Medicine.
- "There wasn't a lot of comforts in those days:" African Americans, public health, and the 1918 influenza epidemic.
- "Midian Othello Bousfield: advocate for the medical and public health concerns of Black Americans."
- "Standing on shoulders."
- "NIH consensus development statement on hydroxyurea treatment for sickle cell disease."
- "National Institutes of Health Consensus Development Conference statement: hydroxyurea treatment for sickle cell disease."
- "Introduction to special issue: advancing the ethics of community-based participatory research."
- "Mistrust among minorities and the trustworthiness of medicine."
- "U.S. policy on health inequities: the interplay of politics and research."
- "Subcutaneous scars." Health Affairs 19, no. 1 : 164-169.
- "Under the shadow of Tuskegee: African Americans and health care." American Journal of Public Health 87, no. 11 : 1773-1778.
- "Making a Place for Ourselves: The Black Hospital Movement, 1920-1945". New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
- The “boom and bust phenomenon”: the hopes, dreams, and broken promises of the contraceptive revolution
Honors and awards
- Head, Association of American Medical Colleges Division of Community and Minority Programs
- Member, National Academy of Medicine
- University Professor, George Washington University
