Essay On The Tuskegee Study

In 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr, said, “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and the most inhumane.” Medicine is another area where racism affected African Americans. Following World War II, there was an increase in human experimentation on blacks in the United States after the Nuremberg Trials. During this time there were various experiments including the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment and the Holmesburg Prison Experiment as well as experiments on children. Researchers allowed prevailing stereotypes and racist views on blacks to heavily influence medicine. One common belief of the time was that as African Americans gained more power and rights, there was a higher chance of disease that would accompany the

Lasting forty years, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study still stands as the longest and most well-known case of researchers’ abusing African American subjects of an experiment in unethical ways. In 1932, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) started the project as a way to study the manner in which syphilis presented itself in blacks verses in whites. Researchers used 600 poor African American sharecroppers in Macon County, Alabama, as test subjects. The researchers also never told the subjects what was happening to them. For years, the subjects were under the impression that they were receiving free medical treatment for their illness; however, in reality these government medical personnel were withholding treatment and gathering data on syphilis. Knowing the poor sharecroppers would never find another opportunity to get free medical treatment, researchers were sure that most subjects would keep on coming back if they believed that they were being treated. Throughout the course of the study, numerous test subjects died as a result of not being treated even after the creation of penicillin. In 1972, the Tuskegee Syphilis Ad Hoc Advisory Panel investigated the experiment. The panel ultimately concluded that the study needed to be