The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans…

In 1932, the United States Public Health Service (PHS) inaugurated its “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male” (Tuskegee Syphilis Study), which promised free medical care to about 600 sick, desperately poor sharecroppers in Macon County, Alabama. The study was designed, the PHS explained, to study the progression of syphilis in black men. Scientists had long claimed that the venereal disease manifested differently in blacks than in whites, and PHS scientists decided to document this by finding a pool of infected black men, withholding treatment from them, and then charting the progression of symptoms and disorders. But the PHS lied to the subjects, convincing them that they were being treated, not just studied. Among other things, the PHS expected to validate its belief in a specific type of racial dimorphism of syphilis: Whereas the disease was thought to do its worst damage to the neurologic systems and brains of whites, it was thought to wreak its worst havoc on the cardiovascular system of blacks, sparing their “relatively primitive and underdeveloped” brains.

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