Public Health Study on Implications and Ethics

Public Health Study on Implications and Ethics of Syphilis Reverby, Susan. (2003) Tuskegee's Truths: Rethinking the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Studies on Social Medicine. One of the most infamous actions (or non-actions) in American medicine was that of the Tuskegee Study of this century. The U.S. Public Health Service, on behalf of the U.S. government, observed the effects of advanced and untreated syphilis on four hundred poor black Alabama men. The experiment lasted until 1972.

How could this have occurred? The reasons are twofold -- the perception of syphilis as an illness and the rampant racism prevalent in America at the time. One of the most culturally and politically significant illnesses in human history has been that of syphilis. Syphilis is a sexually transmitted disease that has been blamed for taking some of the greatest minds that ever lived, including Mozart's, as well as many other ordinary individuals.

It has been stigmatized because of the methodology of its transmission, and because of its association with sexually licentious individuals, such as prostitutes, has often been used as a way of stigmatizing the poor and downtrodden and others who use this sexually promiscuous lifestyle to survive. The mark of the "pox" was once a death sentence, as well as 'said' something about an individual's socioeconomic class and stature -- or in a wealthier individual, about his or her sexual appetites and insatiability.

Because, in its later stages, syphilis physically marked the suffering person, it created a kind of badge, a scarlet letter of physical suffering and illness on the flesh. However, because of the discovery of penicillin, all of this ended -- or so one would have liked to have though. Although syphilis lost its plague-like status because of the discovery of a cure, its cultural significance did not go away.

For the wealthy, the existence of penicillin gave men and women, especially men such as soldiers far away from home, greater comfort and license in seeking sexual comforts. For those who could not afford such treatment, however, penicillin was no panacea. Penicillin simply meant that individuals whom could afford treatment took fewer precautions in protecting themselves when involved in sexual relations.

Thus, the fear of 'the pox' in individuals of higher socioeconomic status was lessoned, and the sense of the pox stigmatizing the poor and those involved in the sex trade increased. During the Tuskegee experiments upon Black men seeking treatment, it was hypothesized that the antibacterial effects of penicillin might be due to psychological, rather than physical reasons.

To determine if this was the case, and to observe the effects of the disease in a modern setting, men suffering the ailment were not given the appropriate treatment and studied as test subjects. All suffered the horrible effects of the illness, to one degree or another, and were permanently, physically damaged. The only way that this could have occurred, author Susan M. Reverby, suggests, is because those who contracted the disease were seen as deserving what they got, and getting their true 'just medicine' by not getting proper treatment.

Because of the patient's poverty and low socioeconomic status as Black sharecroppers,.