he study involved 600 black men – 399
with syphilis, 201 who did not have the
disease.
Researchers told the men they were
being treated for "bad blood," a local
term used to describe several ailments.
What they were actually doing wasn't
treating the illness but simply watching
the men until they died and examining
the corpses to see how the disease had
ravaged their systems.
The researchers never obtained
informed consent from the men and
never told the men that they were not
being treated.
When the study began, treatment
for syphilis was not effective, often
dangerous and fatal. But even after
penicillin was discovered and used as
a treatment for the disease, the men in
the Tuskegee study were not offered the
antibiotic.
The study went on for 40 years leaving
some men to live 40 years with their
disease untreated. It wasn't until the
mid 60s that a public health service
investigator, Peter Buxtun, questioned the
ethics of the study. When his concerns
were ignored, he leaked information on
the study to the press, creating massive
public outrage that led to the study being
halted.
GUESTLIST
2018 / ISSUE 111
15
GUESTLIST
Known officially as the "Tuskegee Study of Untreated
Syphilis in the Negro Male." the Tuskegee experiment
was a study of syphilis in black males.
TUSKEGEE: SECRET SCIENCE
EXPERIMENTS ON BLACK MALES
BAD HISTORY