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.