Tl:dr – A US government-funded study allowed African American men with syphilis to go untreated, long after cheap effective treatments were available.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study
I knew about this one (EVERYBODY should know about this one). But Natasha Tidd’s excellent book “A Short History of the World in 50 Lies” has a great chapter on this.
In five pages she lays out the shocking (but somehow not surprising) story, and the repeated opportunities not to be the worst people on earth that the doctors repeatedly declined to take up.
As explained in 1911 by Dr E. M. Hummell, a black person’s brain was full of “child-like euphoria of a care-free life” and so was not evolved enough to contract neurosyphilis, which was the “lot of the highly civilized white man”.
“The deaths meant the experiment was working, with Wenger eagerly writing [in 1950]: “We now know, where we could only surmise before, that we have contributed to their ailments and shortened their lives.””
Finally, in 1972, a whistleblower, Peter Buxtun, got sick of being fobbed off through the internal processes…
Here’s Wikipedia
Buxtun, then a 28-year-old social worker and epidemiologist in San Francisco,[2] was hired by the Public Health Service in December 1965[3] to interview patients with sexually transmitted diseases. In the course of his duties, he learned of the Tuskegee Experiment from co-workers. He later said, “I didn’t want to believe it. This was the Public Health Service. We didn’t do things like that.”[2] In November 1966, he filed an official protest on ethical grounds with the Service’s Division of Venereal Diseases; this was rejected on the grounds that the experiment was not yet complete. He filed another protest in November 1968, seven months after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., pointing out the political volatility of the study; again, his concerns were ruled irrelevant.[4][5]
In 1972, Buxtun leaked information on the Tuskegee experiment to Jean Heller of the Associated Press. It first appeared in the Washington Star. Heller’s story exposing the experiment was published on July 25, 1972;[6] It became front-page news in The New York Times the following day. Senator Ted Kennedy called Congressional hearings, at which Buxtun and officials from the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare testified. The experiment was terminated shortly afterwards.[7] In 1997, President Bill Clinton invited surviving Tuskegee study subjects to the White House, where he offered a formal apology and described the government’s actions over four decades as “shameful” and “clearly racist”.[8]
Tidd (p.236) to a group of descendants as “Legacy of our Fathers” – it seems to be, in fact, “Voices of our Fathers”
US fund apologises for role in racist Tuskegee syphilis study | News | Al Jazeera
Random – during the Covid pandemic I wrote many letters to the Manchester Evening News. Most got published. One was about the reasons why vaccine take up rates where I was living (a predominantly ethnic minority neighbourhood) had lowish take-up rates. I pointed out that there might be “trust” issues thanks to long horrible histories of shitfuckery (I didn’t use that word, obvs). I may have cited Tuskegee, I can’t remember. For whatever reason, they didn’t publish it.
I got vaccinated, of course I did.
(I have been reading Tidd’s book one day at a time, which is a good way to do these things, imo…)
Further reading
The Tuskegee Experiment – F Yeah History
(I think Tidd drew on this!)
NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES
TUSKEGEE AND THE HEALTH OF BLACK MEN
Marcella Alsan Marianne Wanamaker Working Paper 22323 http://www.nber.org/papers/w2232
For forty years, the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male passively monitored hundreds of adult black males with syphilis despite the availability of effective treatment. The study’s methods have become synonymous with exploitation and mistreatment by the medical profession. To identify the study’s effects on the behavior and health of older black men, we use an interacted difference-in-difference-in-differences model, comparing older black men to other demographic groups, before and after the Tuskegee revelation, in varying proximity to the study’s victims. We find that the disclosure of the study in 1972 is correlated with increases in medical mistrust and mortality and decreases in both outpatient and inpatient physician interactions for older black men. Our estimates imply life expectancy at age 45 for black men fell by up to 1.5 years in response to the disclosure, accounting for approximately 35% of the 1980 life expectancy gap between black and white men and 25% of the gap between black men and women.
Am J Public Health. 2024 Jun;114(6):564–568. doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2024.307643
On the Appearance and Disappearance of Difficult Medical Histories: What Does It Take to Sustain Public Memory?
Susan M Reverby 1,✉, Amy Moran-Thomas 1
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PMCID: PMC11079840 PMID: 38635945
More than a decade has passed since the AJPH essay “First, Do No Harm”1 joined other robust media coverage and scholarship on the unsettling findings of a US-sponsored inoculation study of sexually transmitted infections in Guatemala, conducted between 1946 and 1948 without informed consent or extensive treatment (Box 1). The majority of the subjects targeted in these unethical experiments were Indigenous people. One of us (S. M. R.) uncovered these disturbing records in the course of archival research (Figure 1). The article describing this, “ ‘Normal Exposure’ and Inoculation Syphilis: A PHS ‘Tuskegee’ Doctor in Guatemala,” given to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) before publication in 2010, led to the Obama administration’s apology to Guatemala, and the subsequent federal bioethics reports.2–4 Amid an all-too-brief surge of public attention to the facts of the case, Rodriguez and García’s essay in AJPH contributed an important reflection from a bioethical and legal perspective.1 They joined the many public scholars working to envision what remedies might look like in response to such an obviously egregious historical injustice.
marchudson.net 
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