Tuskegee's Medical Experiments: On African Americans

jibe to J atomic number 53s, "since ignominiouss [in poor rustic areas] consulted physicians only in emergencies, they had to endure chronic diseases like syph. The extend treatment schedule ensured that the few patients who were diagnosed would not be cured" (65). PHS organized a mull during 1926-1930 of Macon County, Alabama in and around the county seat of Tuskegee, which showed that 4 out of every hundred white males there had syphilis but also that virtually twice as many blacks, 7.2 per 100, contracted the disease (Jones 74).

According to Jones, the Tuskegee Experiments originated "as a pioneering piece of public health whose paramount objective was to prove to state and local health officials, as well as private physicians, that rural blacks could be well-tried and treated for syphilis" (74). However, due to the onset of the Great depressive disorder private and public funds for such an ambitious range were insufficient. At that point, Dr. Taliaferro Clark, the film director of PHS' Division of Venereal Diseases, decided to switch the project into a research study of adult black males in the late (tertiary) stage of syphilis. The only known study on the effects of late stage syphilis had been conducted in Norway on white adult males. Many physicians then believed that syphilis had different effects on whites and blacks, affecting mostly neuronal areas in w

Lipton, Robert J. The Nazi Doctors. raw York: Basic Books, 1986.

First Decade Plus (1932-1945). The Tuskegee Experiments began with the selection of 'volunteers' in 1932 in the black community in Macon County. They were not hard to find. The leaders of Tuskegee Institute, local white planters, state and local health officials, and the United States Surgeon General, then and later, gave unwavering detain to the project. The 'volunteers," said Jones, came from "a community in which generations of white run had made black people accustomed to following orders" (68).

Moreover, they were offered gentle inducements: free transportation to and from the clinic; hot meals on examination years; free physical examinations; free treatment for minor ailments; and lessened burial stipends to be paid to their survivors. From the beginning, however, the experiments were based on a Big Lie, namely, that participants would be treated for what ailed them. They were never told they had syphilis, only that they had been selected because they had 'Bad Blood' for which archaean recruits were told they would be treated. Treatment in the form of minor dosages of arsenic trioxide derivatives was in fact provided to them during the first year of the project and some three percent of the patients showed some remission of symptoms. However, the new director of clinic, Dr. Raymond Vanderlehr, was against continuing these treatments. At meetings of leading PHS officials in 1933, Jones says "no one questioned whether the experiment was ethical; no one ever came obstruct to doing so . . . Treatment was not discussed. Everyone at those meetings understood that the role of the experiment was to study untreated syphilis" (144). In 1935 Vanderlehr obtained an resistance for the Tuskegee Experiments from the Surgeon General's nationwide campaign for the eradication of syphilis. Treatments were gradually minify after 1935 from a year to a week or less. Eventually, anti-syphilis medication was dropped entirely
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