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Edward T. Morman, Tuskegee's Truths: Rethinking the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Ed. by Susan M. Reverby. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. xx, 630 pp. Cloth, $69.95, isbn 0-8078-2539-5. Paper, $27.50, isbn 0-8078-4852-2.), Journal of American History, Volume 88, Issue 3, December 2001, Pages 1130–1131, https://doi.org/10.2307/2700505
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The Tuskegee syphilis study was a poorly thought out experiment that attempted to follow the course of untreated syphilis in about four hundred black men and compare their health conditions with those of an uninfected control group. The U.S. Public Heath Service began the experiment without obtaining the consent of the subjects in 1932 (when the only available syphilis therapy involved regular doses of toxic chemicals for more than a year) and continued it through the postwar era (after penicillin was demonstrated to be a safe and speedy cure). Subjects were a llowe d to suffer and die for forty years because the experimenters were interested in postmortem examinations of the interior of their bodies. The study was halted, and treatment begun, only after a concerned venereal disease worker in the Public Health Service alerted a Washington Star reporter to the scandal involved.
In a sense, anyone with a sensitivity to the nature of race and class in the United States can see the fundamental truth of Tuskegee: that a group of poor African Americans was treated badly, based on the unspoken assumption of their inferiority and the further presumption that blacks, especially those living in poverty, should expect little of the society they inhabit. This is not to say that there are not many meanings to Tuskegee and that by listening to different voices we may not be able to better understand race, class, and the nature of science in twentiethcentury America.
