FREE ESSAY ON THE TUSKEGEE EXPERIMENT

THE TUSKEGEE EXPERIMENT

"The Tuskegee Experiment"
In 1932, in the area surrounding Tuskegee, Macon County, Alabama, the United States
Public Health Service (PHS) and the Rosenwald Foundation began a survey and small
treatment program for African-Americans with syphilis. Within a few months, the deepening
depression, the lack of funds from the foundation, and the large number of untreated
cases provied the government's reseachers with what seemed to be an unprecedented
opportunity to study a seemingly almost "natural" experimentation of lantent syphilis in
African-American men. What had begun as a "treatment" program thus was converted by the
PHS reasearchers, under the imprimatur of the Surgeon General and with knowledge and
consent of the Prewsident of Tuskegee Institute, the medical director of the Institute's
John A. Andrew Hospital, and the Macon County public health officials, into a
persecpective study-The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male
(Jones1-15). Moreover, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, which began in 1932 and was
terminated in 1972 by the protest of an enraged public, constituted the longest
nontherapeutic experiment on human beings in medical history. Since the premise on which
the experiment was based did not involve finding a cure or providing treatment, the
question then remains why did the study begin and why was it continued for four decades?
In Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphhilis Experiment, James Jones describes the fate of the
600 Black victims. Ultimately, 399 men, who were in the late or tertiary stages of
syphilis, participated in the experiment. In addition, 201 men who were free of the
disease were in cluded in the study. Both groups of men were neither told the truth about
their ailment or lack thereof, nor were they informed that they were part of a medical
study. Medical personnel assured the subjects that they were suffering from "bad blood,"
a euphemism that in the local parlance, reffered to many ailments. None of the men knew
that the "bad blood" which coursed through their veins was contagious. None understood
how the disease was transmitted; no one explained to them that congenital syphilis was
passed on from female to fetus. It was an experiment based on deception, a characteristic
that it retained for the next forty years. Through a historical analysis of the
experiment several questions arise, particularly the issues of the men's participation in
the experiment and the black professionals who witnessed the study. Why did these Black
men take part in this study? Why did the Black healtth professionals not challenge the
study? The answers to these questions are interconnected and lies captive in a term Jones
calls racial medicine (Jones 15). 
Prior to 1932 information concering the origin, conception, developement, and the
complications of untreated syphilis was known to medical science. The one element left to
be known about this diease was a cure. By this time, scientist were well aware of the
fact that syphilis was a highly contagious diease caused by treponema pallidum, a
microscopic organism resembling a corkscrew. The disease may be acquired, meaning passed
from person-to-person either during sexual intercourse or mixing of bodily fluids, or
congenital meaning obtained through birth. The disease progresses in three stages:
primary, secondary, and tertiary. The characteristics for the first two stages exhibit
chancre sores, various mild rashes, bone and joint pain, as well as cardiac palpitations.
Following the secondary stage is a period of latency where all symptoms associated with
syphilis disappear, a period that may last from a few weeks to thirty years. At this
time, delusion of health is shattered and the symptoms revisit with a harsher intensity.
It is at the tertiary stage that the majority of the damage is done. Tumors begin to
coalesce on the skin forming huge ulcers covered with a crust of dried exuded matter.
Bones are attacked by tumors and in some cases eaten entirely away. The tumors also
attack the walls of the heart or blood vessels causing aneurysms, balloon like sacs
filled with blood. If the aneurysm burst, death is instantaneous. Syphilis can attack the
brain in a condition known as paresis, in which the brain softens and produces paralyis
and insanity. Optic nerves can be attacked causing blindness or inflicting deafness
(Jones 2-4).
The progression of th de disease in each stage had been known prior to 1932, the year the
Tuskegee experiment began (Jones 2-4). In fact a similar study that observed the effect
of untreated syphilis in man took place some forty years before Tuskegee in an experiment
that took place in Olso, Norway (Jones 10). It is from this first study that much of the
knowledge known about untreated syphilis previous to Tuskegee was uncovered. The
difference, however, is that the men in Olso went untreated because there was no known
treatment and in the case of Tuskegee treatment was deliberately withheld. In fact the
discovery of the Salvaran treatment for syphilitic patients prompted the end to the Olso
study in 1910.
Racial differences create a plethora of opportunities through which a people can be
labeled inferior. Jones explains that physicians and scientist have always been
fascinated by the "large number of ways in which blacks appeared to be different" (Jones
16). Thus, the question Jones' presents of racial medicine becomes a more contingent
issue for why the experiment began and continued for decades. Preceding this fascination
or preoccupation with establishing differences between the races is a reason, one that
Jones describes as: 
There was a compelling reason for this prepccupation with establishing physical
and mental distinctions between the races, one that transcended the
disinterested pursuit of empirical facts. Most physicians who wrote about 
blacks during the nineteenth century were southerns who believed in the existing
social order. They justified slavery, and after its abolition, second-class citizenship
by insisting that blacks ere incapable of assuming any higher station in life...here
'different' unquestionably meant 'inferior.' Thus, medical discourses on the 
peculiarities of blacks offered, among other things, a psudoscientific rationale for 
keeping blacks in their places (Jones 17).
Jones discusses the racial attitudes that help to sustain this study. White physicians
and scientist shared in the prevalent racism that saturated the United States especialy
the South. Many of the white physicians involved were convinced that syphilis was a black
disease and that it was more prevaleent among blacks then whites. Jones concludes,
"whether by accident or design, physicians had come dangerously close to dipicting the
syphilitic black as the represenative black" (Jones 28).
To deny that race played a role in the Tuskegee study is naive. All 600 subjects (399
experimantals and 201 controls) were Black. The officials in charge of the study failed
to obtain informed consent from the subjects in a study of a disease with known risk to
human life. little respect was shown to the subjects. The reseachers were not compelled
to explain to the men whatexactly was occurring to them. The reasearchers were evidently
never troubled by any ethical questions raised by the study of this nature. Denying the
men salvarsan or mercury in the 1930's, current treatments for syphilis during this time,
or penicillin after is was discovered and identified as a cure for syphilis in the
1940's.
By failing to obtain informed consent and offering incentives for participation, it is
quite obvious that the PHS doctors were performing unethical annd immoral experiment on
human subjects. From the moment the experiment begun, the immorality of the experiment
was blatantly apparent. Instead of obtaining consent from the participants, the PHS
offered the men incentives to participate: free physical examinations, free rides to and
from the clinics, hot meals on examination days, free treatment for minor ailments, and a
gurantee that a burial stipend would be paid to their survivors. This modest stipend of
$50.00 represented the only form of burial insurance that many men had (153). When the
subjects were administered painful lumbar punctures in 1933 ( commonly known as a spinal
tap where a needle is driven into one's vertebrate and fluid is suctioned from the spinal
cord, a procedure that exposed the patients paralysis or death) their cooperation was
obtained under false pretenses. Dr. Vonderlehr, one of the leading reseachers in the
study, wrote letters to each patient inviting him to a special experiment, adding that
"remember this is your last chance for special free treatment" (Jones 127). The
physicians continued to conceal the truth that this procedure was diagnostic rather than
therapeutic by telling the patients that they were receiving "spinal shots" (Jones 127).
To understand why so many black men welcomed the opportunity of receiving what appeared
to be free health care, though they received bad treatment, one must understand the
social and economic conditions of rural Macon County, Alabama at the beginning of the
twentieth century. The Census of 1930 revealed that blacks made up 82 percent of Macon's
twent-seven thousand residents. Blacks outnumbered whites four to one and neraly half of
the resisdents lived below poverty level. It was all to common to visit houses without
indoor plumbing and no other means of water supply save a swallow well that occupied the
same territory as that of sewage (Jones 61). The fifth chapter of Jones's Bad Blood: The
Tuskegge Syphillis Experiment entitled "The Dr. Ain't Taking Sticks" describes the
destitute environment in which Blacks lived: 
...housing conditions were terrible. The typical dwelling was a tumble-down shack
with a dirt floor, screens, little furinature, a few rags for bedding, and a privy only
when underbrush was not nearby. Drinking water came from an uncovered, shallow well,
often
totally unprotected from direct surface drainage. The people who lived in his rural slum

ate a pellagrous diet [of]...salt pork hominy grits, cornbread, and molasses formed the 
standared fare of the majority Macon County's black residents, while red meat, fresh
vegitables and fruit, or milk seldom appeared on their tables. As a result, chronic
malnutrition and a host of diet-related illnesses were serious health problems (Jones
62).
Medical facilities were present, however, the treatment that each gave was limited. The
United States Veterans hospital located on the campus of Tuskegge Institute did not have
an outpatient clinic and did very little for the surrounding community. The intellectual
aloofness found at the Veterns Hospital was similar at the John A. Andrews Hospital also
located in the vicinity of Tuskeggee Insistute. The John A. Andrews Hospital did have an
outpatient clinic but the impact that the hospital had on the community was not
substantial (Jones 64). It was the norm for many Blacks to go to from "cradle to the
grave" without having experiencing any type of medical care (Jones 65).
Since doctors were only consulted in dire emergencies, many blacks suffered with syphilis
and its complications. So in 1930 when the Surgeon General announced that a syphilis
control program was being created in Macon County blacks werein some cases excited about
seeing a doctor and in other cases instructed by their employer to see a doctor without
any explanation. Initially, the program was indeed a type of syphilis control program.
Later that year, however, it was recommended that the syphilis control program be
terminated and plans for a comprehensive health and welfare program be instituted. In
1932, the United States Public Health Service officers returned to Tuskegee and converted
the treatment program into a "nontherapeutic human experiment" (Jones 90). The goal of
the progam now was to aquire as many autopsies as possible that will support the argument
that people of African descent reacted differently to venereal diseases such as syphilis
and that this disease in character was a black disease.
Once the Tuskegee expiriment began it thrived from its own momentum. The "intellectuals"
who were aware of the study did not reject to it. The black professionals affiliated with
Tyskegee institute at the time the experiment was taking place did not object either. The
question remains why did Black healtth professionals not challenge the study? The
information concerning the details of the experimnet was not at all private; the
disclosure of information concerning Tuskegee seemed very calculated. In fact they
appeared in many of the major health and medical journals of the time period,places were
the average person may not ordinarily look.
However, Black health professionls like Dr. Paul B. Cornely of Howaed University,a black
public health leader since the 1930's knew about Tuskegee but did not object. He
understood the nature of the study and followed it closely, never questioning it. He
explained in retrospect:
I was there and I didn't say a word. I saw it as an academician. It shows you
how we looked at human beings, especially blacks who were expendable...
I have guilt feeling about it, as I veiw it now...because I considered myself to be
an activist. I used to get hot and bothered about injustices and inequality, yet
right under my nose something is happening and I'm blind (Smith 103).
Many Black professionals hide behind the suppositions that what was occuring at Tuskegee
Institute would draw much needed attention to the desolate social, economic, and medical
environments of the Black community.
There is no doubt that the history of racial subjugation, class-consciousness, and
professional status contributed to the response or lack thereof from black professionals
and intellectuals. Historian Tom W. Shick argued that black medical professionals did not
or could not challenge the experiment because they were not seen as equals in the medical
profession, i.e. blacks did coexist with whites (Journal 103). Jones states that
class-consciousness permits black professionals to deny that the experimnet was racist.
There existed a dilemma for the black professionals involved: "on the one hand scientific
energy and money were to be devoted to the study of diseased blacks, long ignored by
science and medicine; but, on the other hand, the whole notion of framing the experiment
as a study of the 'the diseased' instead of 'disease' smacked racism. (Jones 167).
In Bad Blood, Jones presents the questions of why these 600 black men participated in the
study and why did Black professionals allowed this experiment to continue without any
objections. it is quite evident that ultimately, the reasons why the Tuskegee Study of
Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male begun and continued was because of raism. Racism
created the economic and social impecunious conditions of the 1930's that would allow
these men to accept their offer. racism created the conditions that would allow black
people to "turn the other cheek" as their brothers were being victimized, exploited and
murdered. Racism in this case and many other instances of historical racial oppression
offered no alternatives.
Bibliography
Bibliography
Jones, James. Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. New York: Free Press, 1993.
Smith Susan L. "Neither Victim nor Villain." Journal of Women's History Vol. 8 No. 1