Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, the new and expanded edition, by James Jones (TPB, 1993, $2.75)
I had meant to only skim the introduction, but ended up reading the whole book. This stuff makes my skin crawl, but sometimes we need to know about life's dark side.
In 1932 the United States Public Health Service started a study of 399 black sharecroppers from Alabama with late stage syphilis. The PHS would still be following them in 1972 when news of the study hit the newspapers. Three issues were investigated. Were the men informed of their having end stage syphilis? Did they know that they would not be treated for the syphilis? As test subjects were they exploited because they were illiterate, poor and black?
Pretty much the answer to the first two questions is no. They were only told that they had "bad blood", and most assumed they were being treated for it. They were promised free health care, hot food on the days they saw a doctor, and money when they died to cover their burial costs. In 1932 if you were poor and hungry this would have seemed like a good deal.
To me the worst crime of this study was the lack of treatment given the men. In the 1930s the only treatment for syphilis was arsenic and mercury, which had to be taken for a year, and killed as many people as it cured. In the 1940s though, penicillin was invented, and worked, but was never given to these men. Amazingly even 40 years later, many of the men would still be alive. Many, though, would not be.The horror doesn't even end there, as during the study some of the men had infected their wives, and some of these women had infected their children. In 1975 compensation would be paid, but no one admitted guilt.We should have no surprise when blacks distrusted government information regarding the AIDs epidemic.
Equating this study with the Nazi experimentation is an exaggeration, but the parallel is clear. Hopefully the new regulations that came after these revelations will prevent evil like this from occurring again.
Look for this book in the Afro-American section, but if I ever get other copies of this book they will go into both the medical and American history sections. To have it only in the Afro-American section seems disrespectful. (Avail. 9/14)
