The Tuskegee Syphilis Study
From 1932 to 1972 the U.S. Public Health Service studied untreated syphilis in some 400 Black men in Alabama — never telling them their diagnosis and withholding penicillin even after it became the standard cure.
Beginning in 1932, the U.S. Public Health Service enrolled about 600 Black men in Macon County, Alabama — roughly 400 with syphilis — in a study of the disease's progression. The men were never told they had syphilis; they were offered free meals and burial insurance and told they were being treated for "bad blood." When penicillin became the standard, effective cure in the 1940s, it was deliberately withheld so the study could continue watching the disease kill them. The experiment ran forty years, until a 1972 press exposé ended it. Tuskegee became the most infamous case of medical racism in U.S. history, a lasting source of justified distrust, and the spur for modern informed-consent law.
Resources
The web
Connections to other moments, systems, and investigations — the links rarely drawn together.
- part of·ThreadMedical Racism
Black men left untreated for syphilis for 40 years.