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Essay On The Tuskegee Study

1361 Words6 Pages

In the year of 1932, in a small town in Alabama called Macon County began a study that was lead by the U.S Public Health Services (PHC) to study the development of untreated syphilis. The U.S Public Health Services gathered 399, African American men that were in the late stage of syphilis. The study also gathered 201 African American men who were free of the disease chosen to serve as controls. The total number of African American men in the study was 600 victims. Throughout the study many illegal things happened and the victims were not given the full truth of what was happening and what was going to happen. None of the men knew that they had syphilis in their veins and how contagious it could be nor the men understood how the disease was transmitted. They also didn’t even told the men about …show more content…

According to the article “The Racial Economy of Science,” states “The Tuskegee study had nothing to do with treatment. No new drugs were tested; neither was any effort made to establish the efficacy of old forms of treatments.” Moreover, the study was meant to discover the effects of syphilis on African American males due to the ignorance of white physicians in the 1930s. Many of the white physicians involved in the study were convinced that syphilis was a black disease and that it was more common among Blacks than Whites. With this in mind, most people wonder why did the men cooperate with the study? For this reason, the Public Health Service offered the African American men incentive like free physical examinations, free rides to and from the clinics, hot meals, free treatment for minor health problems, and a guarantee stipends would be given to them. The PHC offered this benefits to very poor African American that were very illiterate, which would be an easy target for them to do the study on the victims without knowing anything about the

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