Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment a Race of Race and Medicine

Sad

I own two copies of this important book. One to loan out to friends who believe that such a thing could not happen here in the United States, and, another copy to keep safely tucked away in my personal library.If the victims of this "Medical Experiment" had been Jewish and the perpetrators had been German, the entire workforce of the US Public Health Service would be tracked down and suitably punished for their "Crimes Against Humanity". Sound like a sily analogy? The Nazi's came to power in 1932, the same year this experiment was begun by the US National Health Service. The Nazi's were defeated in 1945, whereas, this experiment really did not end until the 1970's! Each year, the US government spends millions of Tax Payer dollars to track down ex-Nazi's for crimes committed in a foreign country while the National Health Service retiree's collect Tax Payer dollars in the form of pensions even though they denied proper medical treatment for US citizens! Now, there is AIDS. People with African ancestory are genetically far more succeptable to AIDS than any one else. After reading this book, one wonders.....

I loved the loving care with which this book was written. The horror of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study was that there truly was no evil intent on the part of the doctors involved, and all believed that the "patients" truly benefitted, receiving health care they otherwise would not have received for other ailments that they could not have afforded treatment for otherwise. In fact, the Tuskegee "patients" received health care for aches and pains that neither their neighbors nor even their wives and children were able to access, because of their "privileged" status as part of the "government study." Placing the story squarely in the context of its time, Jones does not excuse those who bear the responsibility for the choices they made regarding the men involved in the study, but attempts to explain to the best of his ability why those in authority made the decisions they made, even to the point of placing a black nurse in the pivotal position of overseeing the consistency of the study and maintaining contact with the study "subjects" while the doctors themselves were rotated every year as part of their own "educational" history. Even Tuskegee itself was run by black doctors who chose to look the other way when they knew, had to know, the detrimental decisions that were being made. That is how power works. That is how it worked then, and that is how it works today. Is it because of Tuskegee that the Public Health System lacks credibility? Or is it because of the ongoing and persistent ignorance and incompetence of the Public Health System itself? The system is infested with politics, funding fiascos and unethical practices. It didn't start with Tuskegee, and it certainly didn't end there. This is a very important part of the story, and should be mandated reading for anyone who wants to understand the controverted manipulations of the Public Health System. It is only the beginning, however. Don't stop there.

I own two copies of this important book. One to loan out to friends who believe that such a thing could not happen here in the United States, and, another copy to keep safely tucked away in my personal library.If the victims of this "Medical Experiment" had been Jewish and the perpetrators had been German, the entire workforce of the US Public Health Service would be tracked down and suitably punished for their "Crimes Against Humanity".Now, there is AIDS. People with African ancestory are genetically far more succeptable to AIDS than any one else. After reading this book, one wonders.....

"Bad Blood" is a carefully researched and excellently written account of one of the most horrendous and despicable acts perpetrated by the United States Government, the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. In 1932, four hundred illiterate and semi-literate black sharecroppers in Alabama who were diagnosed with syphilis were selected for an experiment sponsored by the U.S. Health Service, whose purport was to demonstrate that the course of untreated syphilis runs differently in blacks as opposed to whites. It was "race medicine" of the worst kind and, as a newspaper editorial stated when the experiment finally came to light 40 years later, it was ethically on a par with the medical experiments in the Nazi death camps. The men selected for the study were for the most part uneducated (only one man had reached the eighth grade and none had gone to high school), they were never explained the purpose of the study, and they were given no medicine to help their advancing symptoms. Even after penicillin was found in the 1940s to halt or significantly reduce the symptoms of the disease, it was withheld from the patients, who were left to suffer horrible deaths from advanced syphilis one by one. In 1972 the experiment was finally brought into the open by a young law student who passed the information to the Associated Press, and when the story broke on Page One of newspapers across the country, it caused a national firestorm. Journalists, public officials, and ordinary citizens were outraged by the news accounts. Incredibly, when the doctors involved in the experiment were asked for an accountability, their response was a collective shrug and a "so what?" The most explosive reaction, needless to say, was in the nation's black communities, which maintained that the government would never have run such an experiment on 400 white test subjects. The bitter legacy left by the Tuskegee Experiment is the fear and mistrust among many African-Americans of the entire medical establishment, and the suspicion that AIDS is a man-made disease created by the government with the express purpose of killing off blacks and gays; people who hold this belief, when asked why they think the government would do such a thing, invariably point to the Tuskegee Experiment as an example of what the government is capable of. The legacy of suspicion and mistrust generated by the Tuskegee Experiment may take generations to undo, and all of us, black and white, will be the losers. Judy Lind