Abuse in Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments (1932-1972)
The Tuskegee syphilis study symbolizes the most offensive abuse of authority on the part of medical researchers. It has come to serve as a point of reference for African Americans distrustful of those with power. It is important to point out that none of the incentives given to the study subjects were enough to mitigate the social injustice to these vulnerable people has been submitted. Tuskegee is a symbol of research abuse and racial oppression. Researchers and physicians involved in Tuskegee lured men to the study and withheld the treatment watching the die for further and post-mortem autopsies and studies goals.
Scientists infected four hundred black males with syphilis to conduct experiments without any informed consent. This infamous study executed with federal funds has been considered as an abuse committed against impoverished black people for almost forty years. In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot point out “They recruited hundreds of African-American men with syphilis, then watched them die slow, painful, and preventable deaths, even after they realized penicillin could cure them” (50). Even though patients were being infected with a terrible disease, doctors didn’t intend to cure them. They were interested in the experiment success not on black people’s health. Doctors had a marked interest in the degeneration and post-mortem to watch the behavior of syphilis; a high price in the name of science. By the time the study was canceled hundreds of men were dead and a few wives and kids were already infected.
Participants in the study were the most vulnerable part of the population. Black minorities were easy to enroll due to their limited knowledge and unprivileged level in society. The subjects were offered what they never dreamed, medical care, rides to and from clinics, meals, certificates of appreciation, and burial expenses, but they were only alerted about having “bad blood,” a local term to describe several illnesses. In 1932, Syphilis diseases became an epidemic in the rural south communities of the United States. The US Health Service decided to conduct this reasearch on the black population of Tuskegee, Macon County, Alabama. In Syphilis Study: The Real Study and Beyond, Fred Gray states, “It was not until the summer of 1972 that the surviving participants learned through the news media that they were part of the Tuskegee Study. From the time the study started in 1932 until this disclosure, the public in Macon County generally had absolutely no knowledge about the Tuskegee syphilis experiment” (74). Scientists committed many abuses, such as misinforming patients, conducting potentially dangerous experiments without consent, recruiting healthy people to infect them with a terrible disease and not providing the adequate treatment risking them to die.
The subjects didn’t receive medical care even though penicillin was already developed a decade after the experiment started. Patients were deprive from any kind of possible cure or treatment because what doctors really pursued was their post-mortem not their well being. The abuse in this experiment couldn’t be justified just by saying they were pursuing the wellbeing and science development. Several participants did indicate a belief that the Tuskegee syphilis study represented the way things used to be and that improvements had to be made. However, virtually none of the participants could specifically identify steps that have been taken to improve the protection subjects.
On the other hand, Eunice Rivers, an Afro-American Nurse who coordinated the Tuskegee Syphilis Study for the forty years it existed, didn’t think such experiments were an abuse. She believed that the benefits of the study to men outweighed the risks. She was aware the subjects of the study didn’t receivetreatment for syphilis, but she explained that those people got all kinds of examinations and medical care they never would havegotten, Susan L. Smith in Neither Victim Nor Villain, quotes Miss Rivers saying, “I’ve taken them over to the hospital and they’d have a gastrointestinal series on them, the heart, the lung, just everything. It was just impossible for just an ordinary person to get that kind of examination” (95).
Ironically, Eunice Rivers had not remorse of what she did, all the opposite, she was strongly convinced that she had helped those men to receive medical care, but she didn’t state why those men were infected in first place. The damage wouldn’t been so deplorable if they would have enrolled subjects with the disease already and offered a long term care and well being for their family after dead, as long as they would have accepted. In Bad Blood: the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, James Jones declares TSS as a tragedy of race and medicine. “No scientific experiment inflicted more damage on the collective psyque of blacks Americans than the Tuskegee study” (797). All doctors and physicians including Nurse Rivers, who worked on the experiment, claimed they were receiving someone else’s order, so who is to blame for the damage done to all these men and his descendants.
As a consequence, most people agree the biggest abuse came from medical researchers, becoming a point of reference for African Americans distrustful of those with power. People need to understand the story of what happened during those forty years in Alabama to understand the abuse committed to those individuals; First, the enrollment of a vulnerable population into a research, whether doctors infected them or they were already infected, into an experiment without an informed consent. Second, exploitation of the subjects and third, depriving the individuals to access an appropriate and available medical care.These three statements are a clear example of abuse and negligence against a vulnerable society. Rebecca Skloot, in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Skloot reveals “The public learn about the Tuskegee study until the seventies, after hundreds of men enrolled in it had already died. The news spread like pox…rumors started circulating that the doctors had actually injected the men with syphilis in order to study them” (50). Nowadays, African Americans are very difficult to enroll in medical research. They are still mindset about experiments. In Social Science and Medicine, a group of researchers point out there was lack of detailed information on the study as a significant factor in the misinformation and rumors about government conspiracies and genocide. One participant linked the lack of information on the study with the creation of myths and rumors (805).
The Tuskegee Experiment has been converted into a metaphor, symbolizing racism in medicine, misconduct in human research, the arrogance of physicians, and government abuse of black people. Many articles have been wrote the predisposition of African Americans to distrust medical and public health authorities lowing to a critical level their participation in clinical trials and organ donations. Furthermore, an emphasis of syphilis study in a social context remarks that several factors have influenced, and continues today influencing African Americans’ attitudes toward the biomedical community. They fears about exploitation by the medical professionals remembering the period when they were slaves and obtained their freedom as subjects for dissection and medical experimentations. Although physicians also used poor whites as subjects, they used black people far more often.
The racial logic tells us that Tuskegee study can be catalogue as an abuse in many ways even though some details are lost or misremembered. The facts that it was a government study that only targeted African American men, which led patients to believe they were being treated when the physicians denied them treatment, and resulted in a long-lasting manipulation of trust are keys to Tuskegee’s cultural power in memory and fears. Therefore, there is a racial logic that syphilis was behaved different in blacks and whites. These evidencesstate why Tuskegee abuse could possibly happen, in part because racism left a population underfed, undereducated, ill, and in a critical need of treatment.
The racism that led to the denial of care, deceit, and questionable ethics at Tuskegee is remembered to shore up this demand and dismiss racism charges when a drug is approved for only Afro-Americans, while the logic of race that made Tuskegee abuse happened is forgotten or ignored. “Biological plausibility,” focused on genetic expressions yet to be determined, allows race to become the real surrogate endpoint inthis clinical study, and this meta-language, once again, overwhelms other variable, except when race is supposed to disappear to make a larger group of potential uses of the drugappear.
Even though the Tuskegee syphilis study is surrounded by rumors and blow whistles pointing different situations like if they injected them with the disease or they were already infected, is not a secret that the treatment for the participants in such experiment was not completely orthodox. We must consider Tuskegee as a story of injury and mistreatment specially when the subjects of study are poor, vulnerable, and are the potential target of exploitation. Tuskegee stimulates reflection and questions on social justice even though some has tried to distort the truth, misusing the memory of the four hundred men whose most basic rights were violated for forty years. The Tuskegee study stimulates public attention when it comes to distribute responsibilities and moral obligations. Those researchers where focus on science success and personal ennobles throughout posterity but never established sensibility toward those who are socially vulnerable. Tuskegee study demonstrated even using the justification that everything was done in the name of science,researchers must meet certain criteria and respect all individuals’ rights to know step by step what they are being submitted todeterminate the whether it is adequate or not and avoid results as the Tuskegee syphilis study. By focusing primarily on the medical facts of treatment for syphilis, we can argue if the subjects would be white maybe the case would have been different.
Works Cited
Gray, Fred D.”The Study Revealed.” Tuskegee Syphilis Study: The Real Story and Beyond: (2002). 74. EbscoHost. Web.6 Feb 2012.
Skloot, Rebecca. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. New York: Broadway Paperbacks. 2010.Print.
Smith, Susan L. “Neither Victim nor Villain: Nurse Eunice Rivers, the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, and Public Health Work.” Journal of Women’s History 8.1 (1996):95-108. EbscoHost. Web. 20 Feb 2012.
V.S. Freimuth et al”African Americans’ Views on Research and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study.” Social Science and Medicine (2001): 805. EbscoHost. Web. 04 Feb 2012.
