The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment

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The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment The Tuskegee Syphilis experiment (The official name was Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male) began in the 1930’s. It was an experiment on African Americans to study syphilis and how it affected the body and killed its victims done by Tuskegee Institute U.S. Public Health Service researchers. The initial purpose of the Syphilis study “was to record the natural history of syphilis in Blacks” (Tuskegee University, “About the USPHS Syphilis Study,” par. 2). The study was necessary because syphilis was a disease that didn’t yet have an official cure (when the study began in the 30’s). There were 600 men in all; 399 had syphilis and 201 served as a control group for the experiment. The subjects lacked money and education to understand what exactly was going on and couldn’t give informed consent ,but “the researchers offered incentives: free physical exams, hot meals, and rides into town on clinic days, plus fifty-dollar burial stipends for their families when the men died” (50). Therefore, they didn’t question the doctors about what they were doing. During the experiment on the hundreds of African Americans, the doctors found out that they could cure them with penicillin. However, the doctors choose not to cure them in order to study how syphilis killed people and many of the subjects had, indeed, died. Later, in the 1970’s, an article was released which sparked rumors about the southern doctors injecting the men with syphilis, rather them already having it. The government put an end to the study in the early 1970’s. The experiment affected medical history because it helped lead to the creation of the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical an... ... middle of paper ... ...ocaust Memorial Council, n.d. Web. . Skloot, Rebecca. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. New York: Broadway Paperbacks, 2011. Print. Sterling, Robin L. "Genetic Research among the Havasupai—A Cautionary Tale." Virtual Mentor. American Medical Association, Feb. 2011. Web. 08 Jan. 2014. . USA. U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. United States Department of Health and Human Services. N.p., n.d. Web. . Yarmolinsky, Adam. "The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code: Human Rights in Human Experimentation." The New England Journal of Medicine. N.p., 13 May 1993. Web. 05 Jan. 2014. .

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