When looking for information concerning the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, there is a small assortment of books to choose from. I chose The Tuskegee Syphilis Study by Fred Gray because he was the lawyer in the lawsuits against the government, and I thought that he would be able to provide the most in-depth analysis of the event because he was actually involved in it. It was also written fairly recently, so that enables the book to analyze the long term effects that it has had on African-Americans, the South, and history in general. Gray’s book provides a very informative study, but if you’re looking for more information, check out James Jones’ Bad Blood. Gray takes a lot of information from this book which was written about 20 years before his. When searching the web for information on the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the results were quite slim. Most of the results involved syllabi for college classes or websites much like our own that were prepared for a class. The website that I reviewed is from the Tuskegee University National Center for Bioethics, which was actually created from President Clinton’s apology and ideas for improvement of racial relations and medical testing. The webpage’s main purpose is to educate the public about the atrocities that were performed on African-Americans in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, and to help prevent an event like this from ever happening again

The Tuskegee Syphilis Study by Fred D. Gray examines a medical study that occurred in Tuskegee, Alabama which dealt with monitoring African-American subjects discover the effects of untreated syphilis. The main goal of the study was to seek out African-American males in the second stage of syphilis, and then to sporadically perform exams on these men to determine the effects that syphilis had on their bodies. The test subjects were told that they were receiving medical treatment for “bad blood,” but in reality, they never received penicillin, which was the most effective treatment for syphilis. After 40 years of this race-based experiment, the story broke nationwide, and for the first time the test subjects realized that they had been involved in this experiment and that they had not received treatment. By this time, many of the participants had died, but a group of survivors led by Charlie Pollard began to gather information to put together a law suit against the doctors who performed the medical experiment and the federal government who had financially supported the project. The author of this book, Fred D. Gray, was the lawyer who represented the participants. In 1973, the lawsuit ended in victory for the participants and they were collectively awarded $10 million to split between the living syphilitics and families of the deceased. In 1997, President Bill Clinton formally apologized for the terrible injustice done to these African-American men, but only seven of them were alive to witness it.

Fred D. Gray’s book offers a personal insight into these shocking experiments because of his direct involvement with them. He describes his past work on civil rights cases in Alabama, but he considers the Tuskegee Syphilis trial to be the most important in his entire career. Gray’s main reason for writing the book was to explain the events of the injustices performed on the individual test subjects, and how this incident should be an example of immorality that should never be repeated. He begins with the origins of the study. He describes that in 1932, “word spread throughout Macon County that ‘government doctors’ were to provide free exams to start a new health program” (49). Out of the 3,684 African Americans tested, 1,468 cases of syphilis were found, and that number was narrowed down to 408 subjects for the test. These men were told they had “bad blood,” and they were offered free medical care and treatments. Although the main purpose of the study was to discover the effects of untreated syphilis, the doctors continued to lead the participants to believe that they were receiving treatment for “bad blood.”

In the second phase of the experiments, a control group of 200 men was added as a comparison to the syphilitics. These men were also not informed about the basis of the study, but instead were told that they would be receiving “free treatment from government doctors.” Both the syphilitic group and the control group were not to receive any medication or treatment of any kind from local hospitals or doctors. Their names were put onto lists given to local hospitals, and they were told not to treat the patients. Instead, the participants had to schedule appointments with the government doctors, and while they were told they were receiving penicillin, in actuality they were just receiving aspirin or other ineffective means of treatment. During this period, many of the participants began to die because of the effects of untreated syphilis, and autopsies were performed by white doctors without permission from the deceased.

The final phase of the study occurred from 1965 to 1972, and the end of the experiment was in sight. Over two-thirds of the original participants were deceased, and the other 200 were very difficult to locate. The climate of race relations had also changed, and many of the people involved in the study were beginning to reexamine the morality of the study. Even with these differenced and difficulties, the study continued on until the summer of 1972, when the story was revealed nationwide and abruptly stopped.