The Tuskegee Syphilis Study was an experiment that was an experiment created by the U.S. Public Health Service in order to see how blacks males naturally reacted to untreated syphilis, however the recipients didn't know what they signed up for, and there was racial inequality throughout the study. Macon County Alabama in 1932 is where the study with 600 men commenced. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study received a lot of criticism from Health, Wealth, and Education (HWE), which shut the study down in 1972 when over a hundred people died from syphilitic lesions. Originally,the study was supposed to focus on black males from the age of 25 to 60, then they would go through a series of tests including, physical examinations, x-rays, and finally a spinal …show more content…
Patients were told that the Tuskegee Syphilis Study was therapy from the government. The spinal taps and other tests were made out to be simple physicals that the patients would be fine undergoing. All of the misleading information made it so the patients did not give consent to the experiment that they went through, but instead a simple few tests. Dr. Catalona, a prostate surgeon said, “If you’re honest with patients, and they understand what you’re doing, they’ll let you use their tissues - they want to advance science as much as we do. But they have to understand the deal going in” (Skloot). Cr. Catalona informed his patients on the full procedure in order to her their informed consent, which means that the patients were fully aware of what was going to happen to them and what the risks were before beginning. The physicians in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study did not believe that the blacks could comprehend the experiment, so they lied to the people and did not gain the informed consent that they needed, expressing the racism and lack of consent used in the Tuskegee Syphilis