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Introduction The book, Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, by James H. Jones, was one of the most influential books in today’s society. The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment study began in 1932 and was terminated in 1972. This book reflects the history of African Americans in the mistrust of the health care system. According to Colin A. Palmer, “James H. Jones disturbing, but enlightening Bad Blood details an appalling instance of scientific deception. This dispassionate book discusses the Tuskegee experiment, when a group of physicians used poor black men as the subjects in a study of the effects of untreated syphilis on the human body”(1982, p. 229). In addition, the author mentioned several indications of discrimination, prejudice, …show more content…
For instance, many were chronically unemployed or unpaid, lived in unbearable conditions in shacks, exposed to malnutrition, and had severe health diseases, which include tuberculosis, syphilis, hookworm, pellagra, and high death rate (Jones, Bad blood: The Tuskegee syphilis experiment, 1993). According to Jones (2008), “Syphilis is a highly contagious disease caused by the Treponema pallidum, a delicate bacterium that is microscopic in size and resembles a corkscrew in shape. Three stages mark the development of the disease: primary, secondary, and tertiary” (p. 2). In the author’s book, it identified the struggles that African Americans faced on a daily basis. For instance, the author revealed the most prominent time of history was during the Great Depression, Progressive era and other eras. This population in particular had limited access to health care. Only a few of this population had access to adequate medical care; however, majority of them never saw a physician. In fact, the African American physicians were limited, but the whites refused to treat or provide services. During the 1930s, the Depression Era was one of the eras that had the greatest impact on this population. This is the time when whites dominated the United States, exploitation with racism, poverty, and health care was a fee for services, making it …show more content…
The health care physicians were fully aware of how serious these illnesses appeared. Finally, during World War I, the progressive reformers were able to bypass the Congress in 1918 to create a bill called the Division of Venereal Diseases within the Public Health Service (PHS) (Jones, Bad blood: The Tuskegee syphilis experiment, 1993). As the year progressed, the reformers were preparing to start implementing the study. In 1926, health is seen as inhibiting development and a major health initiative is started. This year, syphilis is seen as a major health problem. Consequently, in 1929, an aggressive treatment approach was initiated with mercury and bismuth that caused severe complications or side effects. As the year progressed, the funds stopped supporting the development projects causing two physicians to follow-up with the untreated men trying to demonstrate a need for treatments (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
The disease was viewed as a black man’s disease due to its vast spread in the black race community. In this chapter, it is clear that the medical fraternity had formed opinion of the disease even before the start of the experiment. The theme of racial prejudice is brought out clearly in this chapter. The blacks are discriminated from the whites even after learning that syphilis can affect both races alike. The slaves received treatment like their masters just because of economic concerns and not because they were human like their masters. In chapter 3 “Disease Germs Are the Most Democratic Creatures in the World”, the writer points out that the germ theory changed the way syphilis is viewed in the society. It was clear that other emphasis such as sanitation, education and preventative medicine was necessary to combat the disease. The areas inhabited by the blacks were behind in healthcare facilities and service. In this chapter, the theme of unequal distribution of resources is seen. Whereas areas inhabited by the whites had better hospitals and qualified professionals to deal with the
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by: Rebecca Skloot has a lot of themes, but one that is most relevant in my opinion is the racial politics of medicine. Throughout the chapters, there were examples of how Henrietta, being African American, prevented her from receiving the same treatment as the white woman sitting right next to her in the waiting room. The story begins with Henrietta going to Johns Hopkins Hospital and asking a physician to check a “knot on her womb.” Skloot describes that Henrietta had been having pain around that area for about a year, and talked about it with her family, but did not do anything until the pains got intolerable. The doctor near her house had checked if she had syphilis, but it came back negative, and he recommended her to go to John Hopkins, a known university hospital that was the only hospital in the area that would treat African American patients during the era of Jim Crow. It was a long commute, but they had no choice. Patient records detail some of her prior history and provide readers with background knowledge: Henrietta was one of ten siblings, having six or seven years of schooling, five children of her own, and a past of declining medical treatments. The odd thing was that she did not follow up on upcoming clinic visits. The tests discovered a purple lump on the cervix about the size of a nickel. Dr. Howard Jones took a sample around the tissue and sent it to the laboratory.
The treatment of African Americans in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks demonstrates the lack of ethics in the United States health care system during the 1950s and 1960s. Under the impression that medical doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital were solely injecting radium treatment for cervical cancer, Henrietta Lacks laid on the surgical bed. During this procedure Dr. Lawrence Wharton Jr. shaved two pieces of tissue from her vagina, one from a healthy cervical tissue and one from the cancerous tumor, without Henrietta’s prior knowledge. After recovering from her surgery Henrietta exited the door marked, “Blacks Only,” the door that signified the separation between White and African-American patients. Had Henrietta been White, would the same outcomes have occurred? How badly did a country that proclaimed to be “One Nation under God” divide this very land into two separate nations? The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks truly exhibits the racial disparity in the health care system.
In his book, Blood Done Sign My Name, the author Timothy Tyson tells the story of the highly combustible racial atmosphere in the American South before, during, and after the Jim Crow era. Unlike Margaret Mitchell’s account of the glory and grandeur of the Antebellum South, Tyson exposes the reader to the horrific and brutal reality that the black race experienced on a daily basis. Tyson highlights the double standard that existed during this period in history, arguing that the hypocrisy of the “white” southern judicial system allowed the murder of a young black African-American male at the hands of white racists to go unpunished (Tyson 2004, 244).
In 1987, there was a Syphilis outbreak in a small town Alabama, Tuskegee. Ms. Evers went to seek out African Males that had this disease and did not. They were seeking treatment for this disease, but then the government ran out of money and the only way they can get treatment if they studied. They named this project “The Tuskegee Study of African American Man with Syphilis”, so they can find out where it originated and what will it do to them if go untreated for several months.
...tive on the psychological damages of slavery. White believes “pairing the psychological with the enslaved woman’s means of survival has helped us analyze many patterns that emerged after slavery (10).”
White Atlantans, according to Hunter, viewed African-American women as the purveyors of physical as well as moral decay in the early decades of the twentieth century. White hysteria over the "servant 's disease" led to city officials ' attempts to license washerwomen and control the domestic life of household workers who had access to private white homes. The African-American community, particularly black female activists, resisted these efforts and organized their own public health campaigns to address the problems of tuberculosis in black communities. Thus, the second half of To 'Joy My Freedom effectively demonstrates how the dialectic of domination and resistance occurred on a variety of levels outside the workplace: from dance halls to health clinics. Hunter ends her book with a short chapter on the Great Migration, highlighting the increased repression surrounding the war years, in particular the startling efforts to apply "work or fight" laws to black household workers. Migration out of Atlanta and other southern cities, was, for many, a final act of resistance against the New South power
Vesicovaginal fistula is a tear from the bladder or anus to the vagina that causes urine or feces to leak and can arise from physical complications from the birth of a child. In 1849, the American surgeon James Marion Sims was credited with being the first doctor to successfully repair this condition surgically (Ojanuga 1993). His methods included operations on 14 African American female slaves without the benefit of anesthesia. Many women underwent multiple operations, as many as 30 separate times (Macleod 1999). However, Sims is hailed as a heroic and noble contributor to the medical world and women’s health, yet his work only recently been questioned regarding his controversial operations on slaves. The issues surrounding Sims’ works concern the morality and ethics of Sims’ operations and whether the “ends justified the means” when looking at the findings vs. the methods. Undoubtedly, Sims contributed volumes of knowledge and expertise to gynecology by pioneering new technologies and techniques that were surgically successful (Zacharin 2008). After observing postcolonial society through Sims’ lasting discoveries, his critics and supporters, and his own autobiography, I believe that the production of Sims’ surgical contributions came at far too high of a cost. His barbarous actions helped to perpetuate the degradation of women, and African American female slaves in particular, and also promote slavery. This topic is important because the medical world has a responsibility to acknowledge the roots and founders of its discipline and cannot turn a blind eye to these appalling acts, as so many textbooks and medical journals have. Since its birth, the politics of medicine has perpetuated a racial hegemony and the combination of Sims ...
To understand the desperation of wanting to obtain freedom at any cost, it is necessary to take a look into what the conditions and lives were like of slaves. It is no secret that African-American slaves received cruel and inhumane treatment. Although she wrote of the horrific afflictions experienced by slaves, Linda Brent said, “No pen can give adequate description of the all-pervading corruption produced by slavery." The life of a slave was never a satisfactory one, but it all depended on the plantation that one lived on and the mast...
Dressler, W. W. (1993). Health in the african american community: Accounting for health inequalities. Medical anthropology quarterly, 7(4), 325-345.
Miss. Evers Boys is a movie based on the real life study called “The Tuskegee Study” that took place in Macon County, Alabama, where 400 black men who had syphilis and 200 black men without this disease participated on this study without knowing the terrible truth behind it. Also the participants were poor and uneducated sharecropper who fell for Miss. Evers persuasions and rewards that doctors were offering to participants. The main results that doctors were trying to obtain from this experiment was to gain information about how African Americans men’s bodies reacted to syphilis. During the 1930’s, society believed that black men were inferior to white men, so diseases were supposed to affect differently black men. This study in particular, the participants were not informed about the capacity that this disease could damage their human system and they were not viewed as a human being and they were used as lab rat. Furthermore, one of the doctors who were involved in this experiment Dr. Raymond Vonderlehr used the term “necropsy” that is an autopsy performed on animals when speaking about the participants of this experiment (Mananda R-G, 2012).
African Americans’ ancestors were chained, shrouded in death and pain they were dragged on long journeys across the sea from their home to work till their very last breath on fields run by colonists. With slavery being the foundation for African Americans, what circumstanc...
Slavery dishonored African Americans from being individuals and treated them just as well as animals: no respect and no proper care. For example, Sethe rec...
Reverby, S. M. (2009). Examining Tuskegee. North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press .
Upon receiving the positive results for Syphilis, we are required to report it to Florida’s Department of Health regardless of the patient’s influential position. According to the Florida Administrative Code 64D-3 from the Department of Health, practitioners and laboratories are required to report communicable diseases by the following business day. The Florida Administrative Code 64D-3, which is regulated by Florida Statute Chapter 120, is the rule that addresses communicable diseases and conditions that may have a significant impact of public health.