A Popular History of Unpopular Things
A podcast that makes history more fun and accessible - we love all things gory, gross, mysterious, and weird!
A Popular History of Unpopular Things
The Tuskegee Syphilis Study
Join Kelli as she discusses the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, an experiment on black men (without their consent) where the US Public Health Service and the CDC allowed them to live with untreated syphilis infections for 40 years - despite there being a cure: penicillin.
In this episode, Kelli goes over the scientific context of what syphilis is and how one contracts it, then ties it to the historical context of why the US government allowed 399 black men to suffer from late-stage syphilis when they could have given them the cure. It's racism, sure, but we'll dive deeper to expose what really happened here, and why.
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Sources Referenced:
Michael V. Uschan - Forty Years of Medical Racism: The Tuskegee Experiments
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The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments
Intro
Welcome to A Popular History of Unpopular Things, a mostly scripted podcast that makes history more fun and accessible. My kind of history is the unpopular stuff - disease, death, and destruction. I like learning about all things bloody, gross, mysterious, and weird.
Before we begin, a reminder to support me on Patreon - putting out episodes takes a lot of time, and your support will help ensure that the podcast keeps going strong! I appreciate any help you can give and thank you so much for being a fan. And a shoutout to my newest cannibal over on Patreon - Michael M! Thanks for your support Michael, I appreciate you!
And now, on with the show.
So previously on the APHOUT podcast I taught you guys about the Minnesota Starvation Experiment. It was a WWII-era experiment where men, who objected to serving overseas due to religious beliefs, volunteered to starve themselves over the course of a year so scientists could see, up close and personal, the negative impacts of starvation on the body, mind, and soul. And it got pretty messed up - one of the volunteers chopped off some of his own fingers to escape the program - sure they could have left at any time, but they didn’t want to be seen as men who gave up, especially since they were men who weren’t fighting overseas.
But anyway. That certainly wasn’t the only time our government has experimented on their own citizens. With the starvation experiment, these men were at least told in advance what was going to happen to them. But today, I want to talk about another experiment - one I actually mentioned in that episode - the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments.
From 1932-1972, the US government conducted a study where they tracked untreated syphilis infections in a population of men. I talked about syphilis in my episode on Jack the Ripper, which was a long ways back at this point, but don’t worry - I’ll cover it again. It’s pretty brutal, and when left untreated, can result in death decades after the initial infection. Seriously. Decades later.
The problem, of course, was that these men were not told they were infected with syphilis. They were lied to. And the men chosen? All black men.
The US government studied black men infected with syphilis, didn’t tell them about it, didn’t get their consent about risky procedures to track it, left the infection untreated, and spent forty years keeping track of how it ate them up from the inside. The men unknowingly infected their wives, had babies who were born with it… the ramifications stretched far and wide outside of the study itself, and when all was said and done, 28 men died from syphilis, 100 died from complications from syphilis, 40 spouses were infected, and 19 children were born with syphilis. Some research suggests that the 100 men who died from complications died from what we call late-stage syphilis.
So what we’ll do today is discuss the historical (and scientific) context of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. First, we need to know what syphilis is, how it spreads, what it does to the body, and how you can treat it today if you become infected. Knowledge is power, right? So no shame here - we’ll learn all about it and how to cure yourself of a syphilis infection.
Then, we’ll take a brief look at the history of syphilis - it’s been around for a long time. Once we establish what syphilis is and how it got to the US, we’ll look at the historical context - why, no seriously, why, did the US decide to study black men infected with syphilis and lie about it? Racism certainly has a part to do with this story, but that’s not a satisfying enough answer. Historical context will give us that answer - we need to know what was happening the US in the late 1920s, early 1930s that led to this study, and why only that population of men was chosen.
Once we get all that squared away, then we can learn about the experiment itself and its fatal consequences.
So let’s get started!
Scientific Context
What I like about this podcast is that sometimes I get to delve into science, and more specifically the science that I like the most - microbes. Disease is my area of expertise and my favorite subject, because I’m a weirdo, but I’m sure that’s why most of you listen to me anyway!
Now in an episode about a syphilis experiment, we of course have to learn about what syphilis is beyond the basic “it’s a sexually transmitted infection.” Yeah, it is, but I want to go deeper into what it does to a person so we understand the full weight of what our government did by purposefully infecting hundreds of men, withholding the cure, and watching it literally kill some of them. We need to know how it operates so we can understand the gravity of this situation, right?
Well, even if you don’t agree, I want to talk about it anyway because it’s fascinating and gross and weird, which is what APHOUT is all about!
And again, if you listened to my episode on Jack the Ripper, or even the Dancing Plague, I went over the basics of syphilis there as well, so some of this might sound familiar. So if you already know this stuff, bear with me. It’s important to go over syphilis before we get too deep into the history, since, you know, syphilis is in the title of the episode.
So syphilis is an infection that comes from the Treponema pallidum bacteria, and more often than not it’s sexually transmitted. I only say it that way because it can be spread in other ways - direct contact with a syphilis sore, or passed from mother to baby during pregnancy. But most of the time, you’ll get syphilis as a sexually transmitted infection.
And just in case you were wondering - yes, syphilis is curable when caught early. It’s a bacterial infection, so it’s cured by antibiotics. Amazing stuff, really. One of the most important medical advancements ever. Penicillin is the go-to for curing it, though some people are allergic to penicillin, so there are other antibiotics that work.
And because I’m still an educator even though I left the classroom, let me remind you all that you cannot cure a viral infection with antibiotics. Antibiotics only cure bacterial infections. There might be anti-viral medicines you can take to cure or prevent viruses from wreaking havoc in your body, but most of the time, you just need to wait for your body to take out a virus on its own. Or at least suppress the virus so it doesn’t flare up again.
Now syphilis is a particularly nasty bacterial infection because it can hang out in your body for months or sometimes even years without symptoms. That’s right, you could have syphilis and be asymptomatic for a long time, but it’ll still do serious damage. Because without treatment, a syphilis infection can damage your heart, your brain, your liver, your bones and can lead to death.
Now there are four stages of syphilis, and I’ll go over them real quick for you.
The primary stage is where you get small sores, called chancres [SHANG-kurs]. They’re usually painless, but appear where you contracted the bacteria - so, more often than not, on your private bits. You can get one chancre, you can get multiple - it depends on the person. It’ll pop up usually three weeks after contact. The problem with it being painless, though, is you might never know you have it. I won’t get into the mechanics of that one, but perhaps it develops in a place you can’t see, so you don’t even know its there. It heals on its own within 3-6 weeks, then it’s gone.
The secondary stage is a rash. It could pop up alongside the chancre, or a few weeks after healing. It’s not usually itchy, either, and is sometimes so faint that you won’t notice it. The rash pops up like a shingles rash - along the trunk of the body, that’s your torso and back area, - but can also present on your extremities, including your palms or the soles of your feet. Lovely. You might also get warts, you might lose hair, and have the normal things that you body does when it deals with an infection: muscle aches, fever, sore throat, fatigue, weight loss, and enlarged lymph nodes.
If you didn’t already know, things like fever, sore throat, and the rest are typically your bodies response to things like bacterial or viral infections - as your white blood cells attack the invaders, they try to make the host (which is you) inhospitable by increasing your internal temperature. So when you get a fever and aches and pains, that’s actually your body fighting off an infection. Hopefully knowing that helps you feel better next time you feel like a hot circle of garbage.
Now if you’re lucky, these second-stage symptoms will go away on their own. If you’re unlucky, they’ll come and go, on and off, for years.
The next stage is called latent syphilis, and this happens if you aren’t treated with penicillin or another antibiotic. Latent means hidden or concealed, which is exactly what this stage is all about - the syphilis goes into hiding and can lay dormant for years. Again, if you’re lucky, the syphilis infection will never come back. If you’re not lucky, and without treatment, you will get complications. Around 30-40% of those in the latent stage of a syphilis infection will develop these complications, which we call the tertiary stage. It’s also known as late syphilis.
The infection at this stage essentially ravages your insides. It can damage your brain, your nerves, your eyes, heart, blood vessels, liver, bones and joints. And this could happen right away, or years, even sometimes even decades after the initial infection. Any of these complications can lead to death.
So now that we’re straight on what syphilis is, how you get it, what the symptoms are, and how it affects the body, let’s get into the history.
Historical Context
First, I want to go over the basic history of syphilis in the US. If we’re going to discuss an experiment where the US purposefully infected black men with it, to study its impact, then we should know how it became such an issue here in the first place. I’ll keep it brief though - we don’t need to know every instance of syphilis - just how it became such an issue.
Where syphilis originated is still up for debate, but there are two main theories. The first is that syphilis, a quote unquote “New World” disease, was picked up by Christopher Columbus and his men, then brought to Europe where it spread like wildfire. The first recorded instance of syphilis was in 1495, when a bunch of French soldiers returning from war in Italy were ravaged with the disease. It wasn’t called “syphilis” until 1530, so at the time it was called the French Disease. Hah! The chronology of this could work; since we know Columbus was Italian and sailed to the New World in 1492, it could work out that syphilis came back with him. He sailed for the Spanish, though, so this original theory doesn’t really explain how French soldiers got it in Italy. Maybe it had spread over there from Spain? Who knows. There are no records, so it’s all speculation anyway.
The second theory is that syphilis was also endemic to Europe, so it was already there, but it went unrecognized. The problem with this theory is that there is no concrete evidence to support it, and there are little to no medieval records that talk about it. There are plenty of medieval records talking about other diseases, like my favorite the Black Death, so it’s likely that if syphilis were present in Europe before Columbus, it would have been mentioned. By another name, but it would have been mentioned.
Now we do know that syphilis bacterium existed in the Americas - a 9,900 year old skeleton was discovered in the Yucatan Peninsula, that’s the peninsula in the southeast of Mexico, with evidence of a syphilis infection. And once the two sides of the Atlantic were joined by commerce, mercantilism, and a growing maritime trade network, syphilis was all over both sides of the Atlantic. Once settlements, and then colonies, and then bustling port cities were set up in what would later become the United States, we see syphilis spread rapidly throughout our country.
I mentioned that syphilis was spread primarily through sexual contact - that isn’t a new revelation. Doctors, physicians, and surgeons dating back to the early 16th century, that’s the 1500s, new how it spread. Here’s a fun quote from Giovanni de Vigo, the Pope’s appointed surgeon, in 1514. Quote:
“The contagion which gives rise to it comes particularly from coitus: that is, sexual commerce of a healthy man with a sick woman or to the contrary. … The first symptoms of this malady appear almost invariably upon the genital organs…. They consist of small ulcerated pimples of a colour especially brownish and livid, sometimes black, sometimes slightly pale. These pimples are circumscribed by a ridge of callous like hardness. … Then the skin becomes covered with scabby pimples or with elevated papules resembling warts. … A month and a half, about, after the appearance of the first symptoms, the patients are afflicted with pains sufficiently to draw from them cries of anguish. … Still very much later (a year or even longer after the above complication) there appear certain tumours of hardness, which provoke terrible suffering.” End quote.
So there you go. We’ve known about syphilis and its impact on the human body since the early 16th century. That’s a pretty accurate description to how it spreads and impacts the body over time.
Over time, starting in the early 18th century, that’s the early 1700s, syphilis had calmed down a bit, only showing up periodically instead of all the time in everyone. Through the 19th to 20th centuries, that’s the 1800s and 1900s, syphilis infections declined further, except, interestingly enough, during times of war. In WWI, WWII, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, incidents of syphilis, along with other sexually transmitted infections, ticked up. I’m not going to dive deep into that one - you’ve got men away at war. Things happen. Infections spread. But this time around, there’s penicillin.
Alexander Fleming did an oopsie and accidentally discovered penicillin while he was studying influenza in 1928. He had seen the flu ravage soldiers in WWI, with the 1918-1919 Great Flu Pandemic. He was studying the influenza virus in his lab and accidentally left a petri dish filled with the stuff uncovered. Mold grew in the open petri dish, and Fleming noticed that any bacteria around this mold were dead. A bacteria -killing substance. Antibiotics! It was a revolutionary discovery, even if it was a lab accident. And penicillin isn’t mold - it’s the substance secreted by the mold.
Clinical trials happened, and by 1941, an injectable form of it was available for use. By 1943, soldiers were given penicillin to help cure bacterial infections, including syphilis. Prior to this? There really wasn’t a proper cure.
And that’s where we’re going to get into the actual topic of today’s episode - the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments. Because in 1933, after penicillin was discovered but before it was available as a cure, the US Public Health Service and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC, infected 400 African American men in Alabama to observe the natural progression of untreated syphilis.
Origins of the Experiment
Now precisely because syphilis was such a menace, doctors in the Public Health Service and CDC wanted to study it. They looked at trends in the US and determined that black populations in the rural south suffered from frequent syphilis outbreaks. The initial idea was to find out why, and control incidents of outbreaks. White populations also suffered from syphilis outbreaks, but at a slightly less viral rate - about 4 in 1000 whites versus 7 in 1000 blacks. Now this is the 1930s, so of course people back then went to very racist places on why there was a higher prevalence of syphilis in the black population, and I’m not going to repeat that horrible nonsense here. In reality it was social factors - things like access to education, jobs, and medical care, which was systematically denied to black populations in these pre-Civil Rights era days.
Macon County, Alabama was one of these places where there was a high concentration of syphilis in its black population. The Public Health Service, with help from local leaders, convinced men and women to give blood samples - they wanted the statistics on how many people had syphilis there. But that’s not what the doctors told them - they told people they were looking to see if they had quote unquote “bad blood.” Why?
Dr. Thomas Parran, who worked for the Public Health Service, explained that doctors would use the term “bad blood” because they thought uneducated black populations would not know the medical term syphilis. Here’s what he said, quote:
“Though most of the audience did not know the word syphilis, many of them were familiar with what they called “bad blood” disease and the miseries it brought.” End quote.
Once doctors catalogued these samples, they found that 36 percent of the black population in Macon County had syphilis. Albemarle County only had 7 percent - but this was an area where the black population was more educated, lending to the idea that access to education and amenities makes a huge difference in things like healthcare. But because Macon County had such a high rate of infection, it became the focus for what was to become the Tuskegee Syphilis Study.
Now initially, like I mentioned earlier, the Public Health Service wanted to help cure people of their infections. But penicillin wasn’t widely available yet - it had only recently been discovered by Fleming, right? So check this out - here’s what doctors believed would help cure. To be fair, it did help a bit, but I certainly wouldn’t do this:
They used mercury, topically, to treat it. That’s right. They had infected people rub mercury on their bodies. If you somehow don’t already know this, mercury is incredibly, incredibly toxic. And it wasn’t even effective in curing the patients; it could take upwards of sixty visits to a doctor, and over a year, to eliminate syphilis with mercury, and it wasn’t even a guarantee that it would work. Yikes.
So because the treatment was so ineffective, the Public Health Service pivoted. Instead of trying to cure people of their syphilis infections, they decided they wanted to know more about it. Funding for education and medical care was revoked, and instead a new program was pitched, one where the scientists and doctors could gain valuable information about this virulent disease. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study.
The Tuskegee Syphilis Study
Now one thing I want to square away before we get started is why they chose to only conduct this study on black populations instead of white ones. If the stated purpose was to see how untreated syphilis affects the body, shouldn’t anyone be fair game? Well, if you’re sitting in the corner yelling “racism!” you’re correct, but that’s not a satisfying enough answer. Let’s dig deeper.
For whatever reason, because there wasn’t statistical data to back up these assertions, scientists believed that syphilis affected black and white populations differently. They believed that white populations, with tertiary stage syphilis infections, presented with more neurological symptoms, while black populations had more cardiovascular ones. Neuro means brain, and cardio means heart. Simply put, they believed that white populations would suffer brain damage, but black populations would only suffer heart damage.
But like I said, there was no statistical evidence to back this up, right?
That’s when assistant Surgeon General Taliaferro Clark comes into the picture. What if he could get that data?
Now we in the 21st century (that’s the 2000s) know that this is all nonsense - syphilis will impact its host the same regardless of skin color. But for men like Mr. Clark, who were trying to prove that syphilis affected different races differently, and - stay with me here - races are different in a meaningful way - the Tuskegee Study was that opportunity. Perhaps he could prove, once and for all, that whites and blacks are not the same. And he’d do that by infecting them with syphilis and studying how it slowly destroyed their bodies over time.
So the answer is racism, but it’s so much more satisfying to expose them in this way.
Macon County was chosen because of that high percentage of untreated syphilis in the population, so there was a large sample size. But Clark County was also chosen because it was close to the Tuskegee Institute’s John A Andrew Memorial Hospital, one of the few hospitals in the segregated south that admitted black patients. The study got approval from the surgeon general, the Alabama State Board of Health, the Macon County Board of Health, and with that, the project began.
To recruit participants, doctors went through Macon County, telling people they were there to test for bad blood - again, they didn’t use the word “syphilis” at all. One of the participants, Charles Pollard, said that, quote “They told me I had bad blood. All I knew was that they just kept saying I had the bad blood - they never mentioned syphilis to me, not even once.” End quote.
This is corroborated by Dr. J.W. Williams, who helped examine potential participants. Dr. Williams said, quote,
“The people who came in were not told what was being done. We told them we wanted to test them. They were not told, so far as I know, what they were being treated for or what they were not being treated for. [They] thought they were being treated for rheumatism or bad stomachs. We didn’t tell them we were looking for syphilis. I don’t think they would have known what that was.” End quote.
Over the course of several weeks, doctors brought in black men who tested positive for syphilis - they wanted men because the disease’s early symptoms - the chancres - are more obvious on men than on women. They also wanted men at the early stages of infection, so they looked for men no older than 25.
So the original plan was to try and prove that syphilitic black men were more likely to have cardiosyphilis than neurosyphilis, right? How does one get information on that? Well, spinal taps.
Spinal taps are painful, painful procedures - and in the 1930s, carried the risk of nerve damage and potentially paralysis. A spinal tap is where a large needle is inserted into the base of your spine, and spinal fluid is removed. They could then analyze this fluid and see if it impacted the brain.
Men they had determined did have syphilis were invited back in for some “special treatment,” and I’m quoting the language in the letters sent to them, by the way - special treatment - and were given a spinal tap. The results from this concluded that 46.6% of the men had signs of cardiovascular disease, and only 26.1% had signs of neurosyphilis - the doctors were happy with these results, argued that their hypothesis about the differences between black and white cases of syphilis was correct, and were ready to move on with their lives.
However. Another doctor, Dr. Raymond H. Vonderlehr, wanted to extend the study. Here’s what he wrote in a letter to Assistant Surgeon General Tagliaferro Clark. Quote:
“At the end of this project we shall have a considerable number of cases representing various complications of syphilis, who have recieved only mercury and may still be considered untreated in the modern sense of therapy. Should these cases be followed over a period of five to ten years, many interesting facts can be learned regarding the course and complications of untreated syphilis. It seems a pity to me to lose such an unusual opportunity.” End quote.
So, in brief - let’s keep studying untreated syphilis in these men so we can learn more about their suffering. The plan was then amended so that once these men died, their bodies would be autopsied and tested.
A Dr. Wenger, also part of this study, wrote in a letter to Dr. Vonderlehr that, quote, “As I see it, we have no further interest in these patients until they die.” End quote.
And if the study wasn’t immoral before, lying to the men about their syphilis and conducting spinal taps and studies on them without disclosing the truth about their disease, it certainly became immoral now. They had no intention of trying to cure them - they wanted them to die so they could study their syphilitic corpses.
The participants in this new phase of the study could be older, since they wanted corpses to study, so it didn’t matter if they were further along in their infections. In the end, 399 men infected with syphilis were chosen - 56% were odler than 40, and 5% were older than 70. 201 men without syphilis were chosen to be the controls - the doctors wanted to compare syphilitic men to healthy men. In total, 600 black men were part of the study.
What began as a small study that was meant to last a few months, trying to prove that syphilis affected black men differently from white men, turned into a forty year experiment.
Each year, the men were brought back into the hospital for a routine of tests. They were also given quote unquote “medicine” for what they were told was their bad blood - pink-colored aspirin, an iron tonic, and vitamins. None of these things are helpful against syphilis.
Every four years, men were given a more thorough physical exam to see how they changed over time.
But then, of course, penicillin was discovered in the 1920s. Surely, these men could be cured with that, right?
Well yes, they could have been cured. But that went against the purpose of the study by this point, so despite the fact that antibiotics were introduced and could have cured many of these men (perhaps not the ones in tertiary or the late stage of syphilis infections), the men were kept in the dark about them. Doctors had also chosen an illiterate population of test subjects, so they didn’t read the news or know much about this exciting new piece of medical technology.
Here’s what one doctor, Dr. John R. Heller, said about this. Dr. Heller was in charge of the study from 1942 to 1948, so in the time when penicillin was introduced into the market. Quote: “The longer the study, the better the ultimate information we would derive.” End quote. For men like Dr. Heller, the data was more important than the men. It’s the ultimate expression of dehumanization; they could save these men, but they value the data more than human lives. Dr. Heller also went on to say, quote, “The men’s status [as infected, ill people] di not warrant ethical debate. They were subjects, not patients; clinal [research] material, not sick people.” End quote.
Now you might be thinking - what if one of these men from the study got sick with some other kind of bacterial infection, went to the doctor, and got syphilis prescribed that way, right? Well, it wasn’t enough to withhold a cure of syphilis from them - the doctors in the study went out of their way to make sure doctors in Alabama didn’t prescribe them penicillin for any reason, because of course! That would taint the results of the study! How unbelievably awful.
But WWII was looming, and men were about to be drafted into the armed forces. If any of these men enlisted, they would receive medical care for their syphilis. So to combat this, Dr. Vonderlehr asked Macon County not to draft men from the study. Macon County agreed. He boasted in a letter to another doctor, quote, “So far, we are keeping the known positive patients from getting treament.” End quote. What a vile human being.
One of the study’s participants, Herman Shaw, underwent an examination by the Alabama state government in an attempt in 1947 to curb the spreading syphilis infections in the state. He obviously tested positive for syphilis and was sent to the hospital for treatment. When the Tuskegee study doctors heard about this, they told the hospital that Shaw was one of the Tuskegee patients, so they didn’t give him penicillin. He was sent on his way and told - ‘You aint supposed to be here - you’re a Macon County patient.’
Michael V. Uschan, in his book Forty Years of Medical Racism: The Tuskegee Experiments says it best, so I’m quoting him here. Quote:
“The Shaw incident today is considered one of the study’s defining moments: Shaw was denied treatment with penicillin, which could have drastically improved his health… By withholding this cure for syphilis from the men in the Tuskegee Study, the doctors involved had forever crossed the line between what was ethical and what was not.” End quote.
But despite their best efforts, by 1952, about 30% of the rest subjects had received some dosage of penicillin; about 7.5% of that group got enough to potentially cure their syphilis infection. Dr. Vonderlehr wrote that, quote, “I hope that the availability of antibiotics has not interfered too much with this project.” End quote.
The Beginning of the End
Now, the tides on human experimentation were turning after WWII. We covered that in the episode on the Minnesota Starvation Experiment; after the horrors of what evil men like Nazi Dr. Joseph Mengele did with his victims, the idea of experimenting on people, in ways that would lead to their deaths, you know, like with the Tuskegee Experiments, was generally frowned upon.
Dr. Count D. Gibson Jr., who was not part of this nonsense at all, heard one of the involved doctors talk about it in 1955 during a seminar. Shocked, Dr. Gibson confronted the man, asking whether or not the men were receiving penicillin. Since this was in 1955, it was 22 years after the study began, and more than a decade after antibiotics were put on the market. The response? Quote: “I honestly feel that we have done them no real harm and probably have helped them in many ways.” End quote. And no, they still weren’t giving these sick, infected men in the study any penicillin. Other men not involved? Yeah. It was relatively easy to start treatment for literally anyone else. But these 399 Tuskegee men were denied care.
As more and more doctors found out about the Tuskegee Study, its ethics were increasingly called into question. Another Dr, Dr. Irwin J. Schatz, sent the following letter to the US Public Health Service in 1965 once he found out about the study. Quote:
“I am utterly astounded by the fact that physicians allow patients with a potentially fatal disease to remain untreated when effective therapy is available. I assume you feel that the information which is extracted is worth their sacrifice. If this is the case, then I suggest that the United States Public Health Service and those physicians associated with it need to reevaluate their moral judgments in this regard.” End quote.
The study continued, despite the growing outcry from doctors, until 1972 when it went public. On July 25, 1972, investigative reporter Jean Heller published a story in the Washington Star about the Tuskegee Study - here’s how the article starts. Quote.
“For 40 years the United States Public Health Service has conducted a study in which human beings with syphilis, who were induced to serve as guinea pigs, have gone without medical treatment for the disease [even] though an effective therapy, penicillion, was eventually discovered.” End quote.
It was a pretty damning story that caused an absolute riot - people were outraged. And since this was after the Civil Rights Movement, after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, after so many changes that tried to prevent obvious racial discrimination - to now be presented with a forty year study done only on black, poor, southern men, to withhold medical care from only them - it was horrendous. Immoral. I mean, how can doctors willingly refuse to treat the sick?
And again, I’ll use the word dehumanization here - the patients weren’t seen as patients. They were seen as data. And in this climate, the study was labelled as racist - something I don’t think anyone could deny at this point.
Alabama civil rights attorney Fred Gray wrote that, quote,
“I saw the experiment as a case of racial discrimination and in that sense, it became very personal to me, for I had dedicated my legal career to challenging the South’s racist segregation under which the study’s participants and I were born and lived. The study was as racist as segregation in schools because it was conducted solely with blacks when there were also whites in the community who had syphilis.”
The government appointed nine doctors to look into the study - five of the doctors were Black - and they reported in April 1973 that the study was “ethically unjustified.” They concluded that the men with syphilis should have been treated with penicillin when it was available, and that the men should have been told about their condition, the study, and the risks they faced by not being treated medically for the infection.
The surviving men were offered free health care for the rest of their lives, including an immediate course of penicillin. Their families were offered funeral paments when they died, regardless of the cause. Their wives and children were also offered health care if they contracted syphilis. Later, civil rights attorney Fred Grey helped get these men financial compensation - they settled out of court and the Federal government paid $10 million in damages to more than 6,000 people affected - this included those with syphilis, those in the control group, and their descendants and families.
An official apology was given in 1997 by President Bill Clinton - the first, really - to five of the eight surviving participants of the Tuskegee Study; this was 64 years after the study first began. Clinton said that, quote,
“To our African American citizens, I am sorry that your federal government orchestrated a study so clearly racist… The American people are sorry - for the loss of life and health, for the years of hurt. You did nothing wrong, but you were grievously wronged. I apologize and I am sorry that this apology has been so long in coming.” End quote.
Shaw, the man who sought medical attention from a hospital and was turned away, attended the event. His response to President Clinton? He was grateful for, quote, “doing your best to right this tragic wrong, and resolving that America should never again allow such an event to occur.” End quote.
The last survivor died on January 16, 2004. He was 96 and died of natural causes. The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments stand as a curious time in our nation’s history - it was one of many examples of human experimentation that began before it was widely criticized after WWII, but one in this case predicated on racist beliefs about the differences between white and black men. Though other human trials were curtailed after WWII, this one continued, only mentioned in small groups between doctors, until it was exposed to the public in 1972. The backlash was swift, and the experiment was shut down. But over the 40 years this study continued, and these men were denied medical care, 28 men died from syphilis, 100 died from complications from syphilis, 40 spouses were infected, and 19 children were born with it.
It stands as one of, unfortunately, many instances of our country’s wrongdoings against its own people - and hopefully, it will be a constant reminder that we are all human beings worthy of access to education, medical care, and dignity - regardless of our skin color.
Outro
Thanks for joining me for this episode of A Popular History of Unpopular Things. My name is Kelli Beard, and I hope you’ve enjoyed the story of The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments. Thank you for supporting my podcast, and if you haven’t already checked out my other episodes, go have a listen!
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