Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment

Premise of the Experiment

The experiment involved 600 black men between the ages of 25 and 60. Of these, 399 had syphilis and 201 participated as controls. Over the course of 40 years, they were observed to record how syphilis affected human pathology. Although the men were promised free medical care in addition to hot food on examination days and burial insurance, they were simply told that they had “bad blood”—a general term used at the time to refer to syphilis, anemia, and other illnesses—and never received treatment. No clear and conclusive diagnosis was given to patients. The premise of the experiment was to observe the subjects until their deaths, followed by autopsies to examine the effect of the disease on their bodies; the autopsy examination was part of the requirement for the participants to receive the promised funeral support, granted by the Milbank Memorial Fund starting in 1935.

The research team explained that once the project had identified patients with syphilis, it was no longer interested in them until they had died and [Page 2103]their bodies became available for autopsy. During the period of the experiment, a total of 13 reports involving the study were published. Despite the ethical implications of the study, none of these research findings, published in journals such as the Journal of Venereal Disease Information and the Archives of Internal Medicine, were kept secret, hinting at the racist social milieu at the time.

According to the first paper based on the experiment, published in 1936, 84 percent of patients showed signs of morbidity, as opposed to 49 percent of the controls. In 1938, researchers concluded that syphilis reduced life expectancy by 20 percent. The article published in 1955 stated that in addition to over 30 percent of the patients who died directly from syphilis, more deaths may have been accounted by its complications.

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