With new, experimental drugs like COVID-19 vaccines and Ozempic making waves amongst consumers, it’s hard to decipher any potential long term side effects from medications or treatments when they haven’t had extensive lab testing. Throughout history, Black Americans have been subjected to being test subjects for potentially dangerous treatments that have negatively impacted their health. Join me as we shine a Historical Spotlight on one of the most egregious and racist medical studies, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. 

Black Americans suffer from medical prejudice in situations when medical professionals refuse to take Black people’s health concerns seriously or place them in greater danger by utilizing riskier methods. Even back during slavery, it was common practice to think Black people didn’t feel pain the same as white people. Because of this ignorant idea, many slaves were subjected to vicious mutilation and experiments that left irreversible damage and often took their lives. 

In my recent post about the Fultz Sisters, I shared how one white doctor decided to give all four babies experimental Vitamin C injections. Even though the effects weren’t known at the time, each sister ultimately ended up getting breast cancer and only one lived past the age of 60. 

It’s so difficult discerning whether medical personnel who aren’t Black American are actually taking Black people’s concerns seriously or if they have ulterior motives to harm or even kill their patients. In the case of the Fultz Sisters, the doctor was a staunch white suprematist who displayed pamphlets throughout his office. While we’d love to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he gave the girls the experimental shots to help them, we cannot be naive enough to ignore the possibility of medical sabotage. 

The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment was a huge example of Black people’s health being exploited and not taken into consideration. It was a study conducted between 1932 and 1972 by the United States Public Health Service (PHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in collaboration with Tuskegee University on a group of almost 400 Black men with syphilis. It was allegedly to observe the effects of the disease when untreated, but the men were not informed of the nature of the experiment, and more than 100 of them died as a result. 

It was a continuation of the 1928 Oslo Study of Untreated Syphilis that reported on the effects of untreated syphilis in several hundred white men. The researchers involved in the Tuskegee Study thought the effects of syphilis depended on the race of the person infected. It was believed that the disease had a more pronounced effect on Black Americans’ cardiovascular systems than on their central nervous systems. 

The study included 600 impoverished Black sharecroppers from Macon County, Alabama. Of this number, 399 had syphilis with no visible signs or symptoms and 201 were a control group that weren’t infected. The men were promised free medical care for participating, but they were never informed of their syphilis diagnosis, were given placebos, subjected to ineffective methods, and received diagnostic procedures disguised as treatment. 

It was extremely inhumane to deny the participants medical care, especially since the untreated disease could lead to blindness, deafness, mental illness, heart disease, bone deterioration, the collapse of the central nervous system, and ultimately death. At the start of the study, major medical textbooks recommended that all syphilis be treated to avoid the severe consequences of the disease running its course. Instead of doing the right thing by the patients, the researchers reasoned that the knowledge gained would be beneficial. 

The study was originally supposed to only last six months, but it continued for 40 additional years. The men never knew that they wouldn’t be treated and were banned from seeking treatment from programs available to other residents in the area. Even once penicillin became the standard treatment for syphilis in 1947, none of the infected men received the antibiotic to improve their health. By the end of the study, 28 patients died directly from the disease, 100 died from complications, 40 of the patients’ wives were infected, and 19 children were born with congenital syphilis. 

In 1972, a leak to the press by whistleblower Peter Buxtun exposed the unethical study. Buxtun was a venereal-disease investigator in San Francisco and he sent a letter to the national director of the Division of Venereal Diseases in 1966 expressing his concerns about the ethics and morality of the Tuskegee Study. As a result of public outcry, an advisory panel appointed by the CDC and PHS reviewed the study, determined it was medically unjustified, and finally stopped it from harming anyone else.  

This exposition led to major changes in U.S. law and regulation surrounding the protection of participants in clinical studies. Studies now require informed consent, communication of diagnosis, and accurate reporting of test results, all of which weren’t shared during the Tuskegee Experiment. 

Congress passed the National Research Act in 1974 and created a commission to study and write regulations governing studies involving human participants. The Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP) was established to oversee clinical trials. A report that summarizes ethical principles and guidelines for human subject research called the Belmont Report was written in 1979. 

In 1974, surviving participants and their descendants received reparations from the U.S. Government of $10 million and free medical treatment after the NAACP filed the class action lawsuit Pollard v. United States. On May 16, 1997, President Bill Clinton hosted a ceremony at the White House for the study survivors to formally apologize on behalf of the United States and condemn the shameful and racist medical abuse they experienced. 

Only five of the eight study survivors attended the ceremony. They were Charlie Pollard, Herman Shaw, Carter Howard, Fred Simmons, and Frederick Moss. The remaining three survivors had family members attend the ceremony in their name. Sam Doner was represented by his daughter, Gwendolyn Cox; Ernest Hendon by his brother, North Hendon; and George Key by his grandson, Christopher Monroe. The last man who was a participant in the study died in 2004.

The study was a true reflection of the outright racist attitudes of the time. 100% of the participants were poor, rural Black men with very limited access to health information. The researchers assumed that Black people were particularly susceptible to venereal diseases simply because of their race and that they were not interested in receiving real medical treatment. 

Black Americans have always had to be weary about the motives behind medicines and procedures due to the medical racism so prevalent throughout history. The mistreatment in the Tuskegee Study significantly damaged the trust of the black community toward public health efforts, medical science, and the U.S. Government, as many people became even more reluctant to seek routine preventive care. Even when studies, operations, and medical drugs are marketed to be beneficial, you just never know if it’s actually being used in a way to harm Black Americans unethically and unjustly. 

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Signed, 

Jessica Marie