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| Dr. David Albritton drawing blood from an unidentified subject ("Tuskegee Syphilis Study," National Archives, Atlanta Georgia, 1932) |
Was the Tuskegee syphilis study discussed in any of your high school classes? Do you think it should have been? Do you think these stories illustrate how profound and persistent the inhumane treatment of blacks in the United States has been or are they sad exceptions to a general record of progress in this regard from the slavery era to the present?
The video below, discussing the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, features an interview with Dr. Susan Reverby, a professor of women’s and gender studies at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, who wrote Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and its Legacy. The video is taken from an October 2010 report produced by Democracy Now that includes several excerpts from a 1993 PBS/WGBH NOVA documentary on the Tuskegee experiment, titled "The Deadly Deception."
The segment above is taken from a longer Democracy Now program about documents unearthed by Reverby that "show around 700 Guatemalan soldiers, prisoners, prostitutes and mental patients were infected as part of a study into the effects of penicillin." In October 2010, the U.S. government apologized for this action.
Before I read this book I had never heard of the Tuskegee syphilis study. I think we should have gone over something as huge and tragic as this in our history class at least. I could not believe that it wasn't even general knowledge until the seventies. I think it illustrates how poorly African Americas were treated in the U.S. before we had completely equal rights. I was very appalled when I read this section and could not believe that I had not heard something of it in class or anywhere else before. It seems to have been a very big,horrible thing that was kept on the down low. I even asked several people I know and they hadn't heard of it either.
ReplyDeleteChelsi Norris
I thought the same thing! I have never heard anything like this. I often wondered how could the Holocaust take place and be kept a secret? It's hard to imagine with the social connections we have today. I've always been amazed at the evil in the Nazi's. I never could have imagined that something similar could happen right here in the U.S.
DeleteMorgan Hicks
The Tuskegee syphilis study was not discussed in any of my high school classes, and I don't remember it being mentioned in my U.S. History book much, if at all. It is so disheartening to think that even after such a horrific event has happened, the physicians who participated in it will not own up to their mistakes or even admit that their motives were questionable.
ReplyDeleteEmily Davis
I had never heard of the Tuskegee syphilis study before I read this book. My history teachers in high school weren't particulary thorough, but I don't even remember it being mentioned in any text books. I think we should've discussed it, as it seems like a perfect example of the mistreatment of African-Americans during the segregation days of the US. Things didn't really change until after segregation was abolished,and I think that's when progress really started being made.
ReplyDeleteMatthew Parham
Matthew Parham
I had never been taught about it either. I believe the scientists and doctors involved truly thought they were doing right, just as the nazi's did. Unless you are a true psychopath (extremely rare), it's human nature to not allow yourself to harm others unless you think it's for the greater good. Even if the people involved realized someday it was indeed evil, that's an awful lot of crow to eat.
ReplyDeleteI'm definitely disappointed and shocked that this was not brought to light in class or even in society where it could be well known. This sort of thing is close to what happened in German within the concentration camps. It is a sad day when your realize people with good intentions can unintentionally harm people "for the greater good". I believe this should be known to keep from repeating the past. Even things that put us in a bad light should be exposed to warn others from such things.
ReplyDeleteI had never heard of this before reading this book. I do think it should have been somethng we covered in our history classes. This is a very horrid part in our history and it's a topic that shouldn't have been overlooked.
ReplyDeleteWe didn't cover this particular scandal in my classes, either... we did, however, cover how the phase of human testing is what makes a drug available to the masses, so that it can save lives. While it doesn't make the methods right, it's important to remember that from the study came valuable data that would be used to cure a painful, disfiguring disease. In the modern era, syphilis is not a death sentence--it's treatable with antibiotics, thanks in part to the Tuskegee study.
ReplyDeleteI had never heard of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study until reading this book. I never realized that African Americans were treated this bad in the U.S. Of course I knew about the segregation, KKK, etc. but never about the extent of the poor healthcare or the experiments done on them. I was never taught about those things in any of my history classes and I don’t remember it ever being mentioned in the history books either. My history books taught about the general abuse done to African Americans. They never went into depth about what really went on. I still think things like the syphilis study are topics that America doesn’t really want to own up to. It is too horrid to think that when America was fighting the Nazis they were doing awful experiments to people in their own country, but at the same time America was doing the exact same thing to their own people.
ReplyDeleteYou know, I really hate to split hairs, but this has been bothering me for a while. It's incorrect to compare the HeLa case to the Tuskegee study, and it's incorrect to compare either or both of those to the Holocaust (or if you wanted to get really offensive, Unit 731). I think both comparisons take the offense a little too far... Henrietta was never injected with cancerous cells, as were some of the men in the Tuskegee study. They didn't leave her cancer untreated to watch the disease progress, as the Tuskegee (and Japanese) officials did. Further, neither Henrietta nor the Tuskegee subjects were given these treatments involuntarily. They remained at home, free (as much as any other law-abiding African American at the time) and were nowhere near the state of a concentration camp inmate. I can see the similarities, but it's dangerous to compare these three (or four) instances when they're all widely varying degrees of offense.
ReplyDeleteI had never heard of the Tuskegee Syphilis Story, therefore, it was never discussed in any of my high school classes. I do think it should have been mentioned, possibly in a history class when we were learning about how differently blacks were treated. It really is sad to see that the people involved do not have enough self respect or respect in general to own up to their mistake. It is a shame what pride can do to some people.
ReplyDeleteKelsey Jackson
Many of you have said that you think the Tuskegee study should be included in the high school history curriculum. But what would you say in response to a school board member who made the argument that high schoolers should be taught to take pride in their country and that including this story in an already crowded curriculum would overstate its importance, diminish patriotic pride of young people and would further encourage interracial suspicion?
ReplyDeleteMarissa, I think you make a good point about the difference between the Tuskegee study and the experience of Henrietta Lacks. I believe Skloot's point, though, was that the Lacks family was suspicious of the John Hopkins medical faculty because of actions like those taken in the Tuskegee study (and, even more broadly, because of the unethical behavior of sophisticated Nazi medical researchers like Dr. Mengele). Do you think society already harbors an unhealthy suspicion of "experts" and, as a result, directing too much attention to the Tuskegee study might add fuel to a fire that has the potential to harm the public interest?
ReplyDeleteI think that's a great way of putting it. Even as American ad agencies place "expert testimony" into ads to make things seem more reliable, at the same time there's an inherent distrust of anything we don't understand, and that includes advanced medicine for most people. There seems to be the feeling that "experts" hide valuable information from the people they work with, and this prompts many people to get involved for themselves instead of trusting someone to work for them.
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