Tuskegee Experiment

The Tuskegee Experiment was a notorious medical experiment carried out in the United States between 1932 and 1972, in which almost 400 black Americans with syphilis were offered no medical treatment, allowing researchers to see the course of the disease. The events of the Tuskegee Experiment triggered extensive ethics legislation, (Homan pp 201-219) including the National Research Act, and the experiment attracted a great deal of public attention. Many groups look upon the Tuskegee Experiment as a tremendously shameful event in American history, and more than a few organizations comprising of the Centers for Disease Control have widespread archives on the experiment which are obtainable to involved members of the public who would like to be trained more about it.

There were so many troubles with the Tuskegee Experiment that it is hard to even start to register them. The designers of the experiment laid claim that they were executing wrathful research on the disease, but still at the time, all communities suspected this, particularly after 1947, when penicillin treatment for syphilis became uncommitted. The most important value of the research subjects to the researchers from the United States Public Health Service and the Tuskegee Institute was as autopsy peoples, as they laid claim that they were going to demonstrate that unprocessed syphilis induced broad cardiac harm in blacks (Jones pp 47).

Discussion

The United States of America government conducts an experiment that involves some six hundred low-income, largely uneducated African-American males, about four hundred of whom infected with syphilis, in an economically deprived rural county in the South; even though a proven cure becomes available during the experiment, the study continues on for nearly half a century, and would likely have continued on much longer if it were not for the moral conscience of a doctor, with participants being denied the cure and all of this happening hard on the heels of the Nuremberg war crime trials. It is difficult to imagine such an inhumane human experiment lasting for so long and for so late into the twentieth century in a nation regarded worldwide as the beacon of social democracy, equality and justice for all, (Mckissack; Patricia and Frederick pp 111-130) yet this is precisely what happened in the tiny sharecropper community of Macon County, Alabama, between 1932 and 1972, as chronicled in "Bad Blood: the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment" by James H. Jones.

The event gives a terrific account of the historical and institutional context for the experiment, the experiment itself, and its aftermath, and in the process raises moral questions just as relevant today as they were then. In reading the event, I was particularly intrigued by the role that Eunice Rivers played in the study. Over its forty-year history, she was the only staff person who remained constant. Herself an African-American nurse from Macon County (Herbert pp 189), she served as the glue between the Public Health Service (PHS) researchers and the rural African-American men, and in that capacity was instrumental to the continuation of the study. She not only attempted ...