They were told they'd get treated for their bad blood. Instead, hundreds of poor black men became participants unknowingly in a shocking and truly shameful chapter of American medical history. In 1932, the United States Public Health Service launched an unethical research project to examine the effects of untreated syphilis. The project was called the Tuskegee Study.
Because it recruited 600 black men living in Tuskegee, Alabama. Researchers told the men that they were being treated for bad blood, a term used locally to describe anything from fatigue to anemia. They promised the men free medical treatment if they participated. While two-thirds of the men in the study were confirmed to have syphilis, not one received proper treatment for the disease they had contracted.
So this was a study in which there was no consent on the part of those who were being studied. Also deception on the part of the U.S. government. When penicillin became the recommended treatment for syphilis in the 1940s, Tuskegee researchers scandalously withheld the drug from the men in the study so that they could continue to chart the course of the disease when untreated. Many patients experienced damage to their vital organs and nervous systems.
For some, the lack of treatment led to death. The great shame of the study is that the men thought that they were being treated. Treatment was withheld from them, even after it was very clear what kind of medical treatment would cure them of syphilis. In 1972, an Associated Press article exposed the Tuskegee study after one of the participants brought the story to a civil rights attorney.
Only then, after 40 years, was the study brought to an end. The case was settled out of court for $10 million. This long history of medical experimentation on African Americans creates a sense of distrust, a distrust of doctors and physicians, a distrust of medical care.
In 1997, President Bill Clinton formally apologized to the victims of the study. The President's apology was a welcome first step, but we still have a long way to go before the legacy of mistrust of science within the black community is fully overcome.