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...

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…