Today’s Special, Free Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
The letter in a clean white envelope embossed with a government letterhead arrived at the run-down shacks of hundreds of sick black men in rural Alabama. It invited them to be examined by government doctors, and closed: REMEMBER THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE FOR SPECIAL FREE TREATMENT. BE SURE TO MEET THE NURSE.
Those words helped lure several hundred dirt-poor, uneducated black men in the middle of the Depression to participate in what would become the longest non-therapeutic experiment on human beings in medical history, according to Bad Blood by James H. Jones.
A doctor draws blood from one of the “subjects”.
The U.S. Public Health Service (fore-runner of the Center for Disease Control), with the blessing of the various Surgeons General, from 1932 to 1972 studied the long-term effects of syphilis on 399 black men who were already infected. Government and local doctors periodically examined those men, routinely denied them any treatment for venereal disease, even when “miracle cure” penicillin became widely available in the 1950s. The families received a fifty-dollar burial allowance in exchange for allowing autopsies to performed and the men, while alive, received minimal medical care for other ailments, such as receiving pink aspirin tablets and red iron tonics. At least twenty-eight of the men died from syphilis-related complications.
The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment arguably marks the ugliest stain on the public health record of the United States.
It took an outraged federal employee, Peter Buxtun, leaking details to the Associated Press to finally blow the whistle, and the U.S. government later settled a class action suit, paying $10 million to the victims.
In hindsight, it seems clearly unconscionable that an American government could authorize such a racist and cruel experiment.
How could it happen here?
Contrary to most reports, the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment was not top secret. Doctors wrote numerous articles on it in medical journals, and the medical community at large never protested until Dr. Irwin Schatz wrote a scathing letter in 1965. “I am utterly astounded by the fact that physicians allow patients with a potentially fatal disease to remain untreated when effective therapy is available.” Dr. Anne Yobs of the U.S. Public Health Service stapled a note onto it and filed it away: “This is the first letter of this type we have received. I do not plan to answer this letter.”
The original rationale was to track long-term effects of untreated syphilis on black men, just as an earlier Oslo study had tracked the long-term effects on white European men. The enormous difference between the two studies: the Oslo researchers checked on untreated men who arrived at various clinics; the American study involved withholding treatment so as to study the men.
The experiment was facilitated by the collaboration of the prestigious Tuskegee Institute, a pioneer of African-American higher education.
Finally, once the plug was pulled, on March 3, 1973, Caspar Weinberger, secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, authorized treatment for the survivors.
Jones states in his book that none of the white male doctors who founded and fought for the continuation of the experiment ever officially apologized.
Culled from: An Underground Education
Mütter Museum Specimen Du Jour!
Lordosis (Curvature of the Lower Spine), albumen prints.
Page from an album of medical photographs by James F. Wood. Wood made this photograph for James Kelly, M.D. (1862-1923), who with DeForest Willard, M.D. (1846-1920), established the department of orthopedic surgery at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, the first of its kind in Philadelphia. Presented to the Museum by James F. Wood, 1898.
Culled from: Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia