The Tuskegee Experiment: a dark chapter in medical history

America's dark history of medical racism

The dark and entirely unethical Tuskegee Experiment was by no means the first instance of medical racism in the United States, nor was it the last.

Since the first boat of enslaved human beings arrived in the United States in 1619, the powers of American white supremacy loaded everything heavy, unpleasant, and painful onto their stolen shoulders. Not only labor, but also in the name of science and 'healthcare.'

Unethical human experimentation

Experimental operations, dangerous surgeries, and long-term studies were commonplace during the age of slavery, through the Jim Crow era, and even during the civil rights movement.

James Marion Sims

One of the most infamous figures in American medicine was James Marion Sims. Considered the father of modern gynecology, Sims, his beliefs, and his experiments immediately crumble and fall into the shadow of violence and depravity when under modern scrutiny. Sims was widely known to perform extremely painful and invasive gynecological exploratory surgeries and operations on enslaved women whom he had bought for the express purpose of experimentation. Sims also showcased his racist and uneducated scientific beliefs by claiming African Americans didn't feel pain in the same way he or his white patients did, and therefore there was no need to apply anesthesia. Sims' statue in Central Park was taken down in 2018 after years of public outcry.

Eugenics and nonconsensual sterilization

The story of eugenics in America is long and dreadful, and only began to come to a close in the wake of World War II, when the public began to see the striking similarities between American eugenics and Nazi eugenics. Forced sterilization was a primary tool of eugenicists, who hoped to rid the world of anyone deemed inferior. The term "inferior" was applied on broad, sweeping strokes to non-whites, certain religions, neurodivergent individuals, and countless psychological conditions.

The 1946 STD Inoculation Study

Another unethical study on the effects of STDs like syphilis and gonorrhea carried out by the United States government occurred in Guatemala between 1946 and 1948. There, professionals with the United States Public Health Service intentionally infected over 1,300 people, mostly soldiers, orphans, and various institutionalized demographics, with painful and dangerous STDs like gonorrhea, chancroid, and syphilis. Many people around the world, especially in Guatemala, consider this study a crime against humanity.

Yellow fever in Georgia

During the Cold War, when warfare experiments were given the utmost priority in the United States and abroad, the American government once again chose African-American citizens as their test subjects. In 1955, the military released no less than 300,000 yellow fever mosquitos into the mostly Black city of Savannah, Georgia, to see how useful they could be in an entomological attack against actual enemies. Although officials have claimed the mosquitos were uninfected, dozens of Savannah residents fell dangerously sick during the test.

The Tuskegee Syphilis Study

The list of unethical, covert, and racially motivated medical practices in American history goes on and on. However, the most famous, and certainly the most prolonged of the events, is the 40-year-long Tuskegee Syphilis Study.

Why is syphilis so dangerous?

In 2015, out of the 45.5 million global syphilis infections, 107,00 of those people died from syphilis or complications from syphilis. Syphilis can also be passed on to fetuses in the womb in the form of congenital syphilis. Some 40% of fetuses infected with congenital syphilis will be stillborn, or die within their first year of life.

Oslo, 1928

The long-term effects of syphilis had only barely been studied before the 20th century. In 1928, physicians in Oslo published the 'Oslo Study of Untreated Syphilis,' a retrospective study of syphilis on patients who had naturally become infected.

Macon County, Alabama

The county surrounding Tuskegee, Macon County, had been the land of plantations before the American Civil War. Since the abolition of slavery, the area had become sharecropper country. Countless landless sharecroppers of all races toiled in the cotton and tobacco fields for little, if any, money.

The 'volunteers'

The USPHS attracted over 600 poor Black men, mostly sharecroppers, from all around Macon County to participate. Not a single 'volunteer' was told the true nature of the study.

The lies

The 600 participants were told they were to be treated for "bad blood." Of those 600 men, 399 were infected with syphilis, while 201 constituted a healthy, uninfected control group.

The 'treatments'

Doctors treated the syphilis-infected men with just about anything that wouldn't actually affect the syphilis. Extremely painful and invasive spinal taps were regularly taken in order to study the unsuspecting patients' spinal fluid.

Blocking treatment access

In order to preserve the efficacy of their study, the USPHS had to ensure their research subjects didn't find outside help for their ailments. Information about syphilis and its available treatments were completely withheld from the unwitting participants.

Forty years of suffering

It would be an enormous task to try to sell this line of thinking to the hundreds of individuals and families affected, and just as hard to justify the experiment in a modern court. Forty years of unexplained ailments, from painful sores and sudden blindness to psychosis and death, could have been easily treated, not to mention avoided altogether.

World War II

When the United States entered World War II at the end of 1941, 256 Tuskegee patients were drafted and examined by doctors outside of the study. They were quickly diagnosed with syphilis and ordered to seek treatment, but the USPHS stepped in to remove all of their names from the draft list so that their research could continue. Back under the 'care' of Tuskegee clinicians, the withholding of life-saving treatment continued.