The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, or the study on The Effects of Untreated Syphilis in Negro Male, as it was officially titled, was a research project conducted in Macon County in the state of Alabama between 1932 and 1972, with 600 black men as the subjects, of which 399 had been identified as syphilitic and 201 were part of the non-syphilitic control group (Jones 1993; Baker et al. 2005). The Macon County was chosen because of the high rate of syphilis prevalence among the black population there (Baker et al. 2005). Funded by the United States Public Health Services (USPHS) and led by a team of physicians and other health care providers, the experiment was aimed at understanding the effects of syphilis among black men, if left untreated. …show more content…
The major focus of this experiment was the interest in racial differences between black and white men, based on the observed effects of syphilis, which at the time was often attributed to the differences in the biological makeup of the two races (Brandt 1978). The premise of the Tuskegee study was that the "treatment for venereal disease among blacks was impossible, particularly because in its latent stage the symptoms of syphilis [became] quiescent" (Brandt 1978:22). So, their justification was that when treatment was not going to have any positive bearing on the health outcomes for these black men, then why not study them in order to understand better how syphilis influences them, and thereby study the disease better. Moreover, they opined, that even if treatment was available, health services for black men were few and far in between in the rural South, and therefore many of these men would go untreated …show more content…
This made it easier to deceive and exploit them. When they recruited the sample of syphilitic and non-syphilitic black men, they told many of these men that they were being treated for "bad blood" (Jones 1993). Some subjects believed they were being treated for rheumatism or bad stomachs (Jones 1993). They were also offered various incentives such as "free physical examinations, free rides to and from the clinics, hot meals on examination days, free treatment for minor ailments, and a guarantee that burial stipends would be paid to their survivors" (Jones 1993:4). However, at no point during the study did they have any intention of providing treatment for the venereal disease, even when they knew that these men had such a disease (Jones 1993). They used different tactics, often with the assistance and participation of African American health care personnel, in order to continue deceiving the research subjects and making them undergo a variety of medical tests, many of which were excruciatingly painful. Even when the use of penicillin for such bacterial infections had gained popularity in the 1940s, the subjects of the Tuskegee study were denied this treatment although the patients could have potentially benefited from it (Jones 1993). The experiment came to an unplanned end in 1972 when a journalist broke the story in the media, and the USPHS was forced to terminate the study due to the shock