A New York organization paid poor widows of Tuskegee experiment $100 to further study their dead husbands’ bodies

A Black man has blood drawn by a doctor in Tuskegee, Alabama in the Tuskegee syphilis study. Image: The National Archives

The Tuskegee Experiment was a 40-year research project that studied the effects of the disease syphilis when left untreated. Black rural farm workers were the subjects of the U.S. government-sponsored study and were kept in the dark as they were being left to suffer. A whistleblower revealed the unethical and morally unjust aims of the study after he went to the press in 1972.

For four decades, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) studied the effects of the untreated disease in 600 Black men from Macon County, Ala. Starting in 1932, 399 of the 600 sharecroppers to be studied were already afflicted with the venereal disease. The farmers were led to believe that they were being treated for “bad blood,” a term used to describe a number of unknown ailments. The Tuskegee Institute, also in Alabama, was the site where the study took place.

The disease spread to the families of the men in a devastating fashion. By the end of the experiments, 28 men died from the disease, another 100 died from complications related to the disease, 40 of the wives contracted syphilis, and 19 children were born with congenital syphilis.

After several years, a foundation in New York has apologized for its role in the infamous experiment. The Milbank Memorial Fund said its role was to pay for the funeral expenses of the deceased men, up to $100, if their widows agreed to an autopsy allowing doctors to further study the bodies of their dead husbands, the Associated Press reported.

The fund’s apology came with a donation to Voices of our Fathers Legacy Foundation, a descendants’ group. The Milbank Memorial Fund said it became part of the study in 1935 after the U.S. surgeon general at the time, Hugh Cumming, asked it to. Milbank gave a total of $20,150 for about 234 autopsies, according to a study by historian Susan M Reverby.

Christopher F. Koller, president of the Fund, said there is no justification for what happened. “The upshot of this was real harm,” he told the Associated Press. 

In 1972 when Peter Buxtun, a White PHS venereal disease researcher, got the insidious nature of the study out to the public by way of the Washington Star, Sen. Edward Kennedy called several Congressional hearings over the matter, which Buxtun and other researchers testified. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) filed a class-action lawsuit, which was later settled for $9 million. The settlement also included free treatment to the surviving study patients and their families.

In 1974, Congress passed the National Research Act, which helped develop guidelines for human medical research and was sparked by the findings at Tuskegee. On May 16, 1997, then-President Bill Clinton apologized to the study participants and their families, calling the act “racist.”

source: https://face2faceafrica.com/article/a-new-york-organization-paid-poor-widows-of-tuskegee-experiment-100-to-further-study-their-dead-husbands-bodies

Amerikan Crime: #84 Medical Racism and Homicide—the Tuskegee Syphilis “Study”

Between 1932 and 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service and the Centers for Disease Control carried out experiments on 600 Black men in the rural South. The supposed “study,” according to a commentator, “used human beings as laboratory animals in a long and inefficient study of how long it takes syphilis to kill someone.” Above, blood being drawn in the early 1950s.

The Crime: Between 1932 and 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) and the Centers for Disease Control studied the progression of untreated syphilis in a group of rural African-American men in Alabama under the guise of giving them free health care. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the men were told they were being treated for having “bad blood.”

A total of 600 African-American sharecroppers from Macon County, Alabama, were enrolled in the study. Of them, 399 had contracted syphilis before the study began, while the remaining 201 did not have the disease. These impoverished and often illiterate subjects were recruited with misleading promises of “special free treatment,” which were actually spinal taps done without anesthesia to study the neurological effects of syphilis, and they were enrolled without their informed consent (the men were never told the name of the study). The men were given medical care, meals, and free burial insurance for participating in the study. Poverty and racism were so profound that these benefits were unheard of among Black sharecroppers and a big enticement for agreeing to join the study.

None of the men infected were even told they had the disease and none were treated with penicillin even after the antibiotic became the standard treatment of syphilis in 1947—25 years before the Tuskegee study ended. Twenty-eight of the men died directly of syphilis, 100 died of related complications, 40 of their wives were infected, and 19 of their children were born with congenital syphilis.

The Criminals: The U.S. Public Health Service began the experiment under the Hoover administration in conjunction with Tuskegee University in Alabama, and it extended all the way to the Nixon regime.

The Alibi: The study was to record the natural history of syphilis among Black people. The study was called the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male,” and when it began there was no safe and effective treatment for syphilis.

Although the U.S. Public Health Service touted the study as one of great scientific merit, it has produced zero benefits to society or medical science. It took almost 40 years before someone involved in the study took a hard and honest look at the end results, reporting that “nothing learned will prevent, find, or cure a single case of infectious syphilis or bring us closer to our basic mission of controlling venereal disease in the United States.” When the experiment was brought to the attention of the media in 1972, news anchor Harry Reasoner described it as an experiment that “used human beings as laboratory animals in a long and inefficient study of how long it takes syphilis to kill someone.”

Sources:

“About the USPHS Syphilis Study,” Tuskegee University

“Tuskegee syphilis experiment,” Wikipedia

Medical Apartheid—The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, by Harriet A. Washington, Chapter 7: “A Notoriously Syphilis-Soaked Race” – What Really Happened At Tuskegee?”