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Discrimination In The Tuskegee Experiment

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A poverty-stricken, black southern tobacco farmer named Henrietta Lacks became one of the most valuable cells in life itself. Being stripped of having any knowledge of her beautiful yet shocking possession, scientists claimed them as their own and referred to them as “HeLa cells”. Not only did Henrietta not know about her immortal cells, she was also medically mistreated as well as her family. The Lacks family didn’t know about Henrietta’s cells by more than twenty-five years later meanwhile they’re still indigent. Medical assistance can jeopardize our entitlement to our own bodies which are absurd. Doctors have given ill-treatment to many other simple people like Henrietta. Patients like Henrietta have faced issues with informed consent because of doctors wanting to research and gain a profit. Racial discrimination plays a factor in the lack of empathy towards patients. In "The Immortal Life of …show more content…
The Tuskegee Experiment was an infamous medical research done on African- American men who were seeking free medical treatment. Patients were being tested for bad blood which is a variety of illness. The men had syphilis, which is an is a sexually transmitted disease, but they had no knowledge of it. The men received placebos even when penicillin became a vaccine in 1942 for the treatment of syphilis. The experiment was demeaning and highly involved racial discrimination "During the 1920s, researchers of the U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) developed plans to study the response of black males to disease, hypothesizing that the response would differ from that of white males. In Macon County, Alabama, nearly forty percent of black males tested positive for syphilis and researchers believed that this community would be ideal to study disease progression." (Nelson R., Cameron. In Remembrance There Is Prevention: A Brief Review

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