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Tuskegee's Truths: Rethinking the Tuskegee Syphilis Study
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About Tuskegee's Truths: Rethinking The Tuskegee Syphilis
Product Description Between 1932 and 1972, approximately six hundred African American men in Alabama served as unwitting guinea pigs in what is now considered one of the worst examples of arrogance, racism, and duplicity in American medical research--the Tuskegee syphilis study. Told they were being treated for "bad blood," the nearly four hundred men with late-stage syphilis and two hundred disease-free men who served as controls were kept away from appropriate treatment and plied instead with placebos, nursing visits, and the promise of decent burials. Despite the publication of more than a dozen reports in respected medical and public health journals, the study continued for forty years, until extensive media coverage finally brought the experiment to wider public knowledge and forced its end. This edited volume gathers articles, contemporary newspaper accounts, selections from reports and letters, reconsiderations of the study by many of its principal actors, and works of fiction, drama, and poetry to tell the Tuskegee story as never before. Together, these pieces illuminate the ethical issues at play from a remarkable breadth of perspectives and offer an unparalleled look at how the study has been understood over time. From The New England Journal of Medicine Tuskegee's Truths: Rethinking the Tuskegee Syphilis Study revisits the infamous Tuskegee Study and explores its contemporary meanings and relevance for American society. The Tuskegee Study was an experiment conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service from 1932 to 1972. Researchers observed the effects of advanced syphilis on 399 poor black sharecroppers from Macon County, Alabama, who were followed clinically but not treated, even after the introduction of penicillin therapy in 1943. The book's editor, a professor of women's studies at Wellesley College, argues that the Tuskegee Study stands out amid a shameful history of unethical medical research. Like many other examples of unethical research, the study reveals how government officials deceive, how methods to protect human subjects fail, how research exploits human beings, how economically and socially disadvantaged groups are taken advantage of, and how human rights are violated and the violations sustained. The Tuskegee Study shares these common failings and also carries distinct lessons of its own. These lessons emerge as "truths" when we look at this research as a powerful metaphor for racism in American society. "Tuskegee's truths," as the book's title suggests, remain true today because victimization by racist means endures. The racist climate of American society during the days of the Tuskegee Study did not end abruptly with the 1972 press release that led to the termination of the study. Instead, the truths of Tuskegee are troubling precisely because we cannot write them off as merely historical. As President Clinton reflected in his 1996 public apology to the survivors of the study and their families, we must work continually to involve minority communities in research and health care, educate medical researchers in bioethics, involve minority groups in bioethics programs, and earn and keep the trust of research subjects who are members of disadvantaged and minority groups. While retaining this central focus, the book investigates the problem of racism in medical research at multiple levels. With articles and documents spanning more than 600 pages, the book brings together an impressive array of physicians, historians of medicine and science, sociologists, government officials, attorneys, bioethicists, poets, and others. Scholarly essays explore class, sex, and sexuality. Historical records document interviews, correspondence, and testimony by researchers, subjects, and government officials. Ethical debates reveal contrasting positions about the role of race in contemporary medical-research controversies. Also included are excerpts from a controversial play and Emmy Award-winning movie, excerp
