The Tuskegee Syphilis Study

THE TUSKEGEE SYPHILIS STUDY

Shocking Revelations

Perhaps the most shocking medical story of 1972 was the tale of the medical experiments in Tuskegee, Alabama. For forty years the U.S. Public Health Service conducted a study in which four hundred African-American syphilis victims unknowingly served as the subjects of a medical experiment. Even though penicillin, a cure for syphilis, became available in 1943, the study subjects were never treated for the disease. Instead the study used the corpses of the subjects to determine the effects of disease on the human body. The officials of the health service who began the study were long retired by 1972; but their successors expressed serious doubts about the morality of the investigation. The experiment raised important new ethical questions for the medical profession.

New Regulations

Under examination by the press, the Public Health Service was not able to locate a formal protocol for the experiment. Later it was learned that one had never existed. Procedure simply evolved. Public and political outrage led to a national review of federal guidelines on human experimentation, and the result was a complete reworking of HEW regulations on human experimentation.

The Survivors

For the men in the Tuskegee study, the changes were all too late. Beginning in April 1973 the Centers for Disease Control found the few survivors, and the government promised to provide and pay for their medical expenses for the rest of their lives. In 1975 the government extended treatment to their wives who had contracted syphilis and their children with congenital syphilis, many of whom had syphilis directly attributable to the government's failure to treat the men. But more than any other experiment in American history, the Tuskegee study convinced legislators and bureaucrats alike that tough new regulations had to be adopted if human subjects of medical experiments were to be protected.

Sources:

Saul Jarcho, M.D., and Gene Brown, eds., Medicine and Health Care (New York: The New York Times/Arno Press, 1977), p. 383;

James H. Jones, Bad Blood (New York: Free Press, 1981).